Configuring Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is designed to work out of the box. Most settings can be changed on the fly using the settings API. While in development, the default settings should be sufficient. But for production, depending on your application, you need to modify settings, such as memory, file descriptors, and so on. In this section, we will look at the important settings to configure before going to production. First, let's start by looking at the directory structure of Elasticsearch.

The directory structure

You can choose between .zip/.tar.gz or deb/rpm to install Elasticsearch. Depending on how you install, the directory structure, location of log files, the location of the configuration file, and how you can start/stop Elasticsearch are different.

zip/tar.gz

Let's look at the directory structure when you installed Elasticsearch using a .zip/.tar.gz file. By default, when you unzip the elasticsearch-5.1.2 package, the following directories are within it:

Name	Description
bin	This contains...