The easiest way to understand what Elasticsearch can do for you is to play with it, so let’s get started!

The only requirement for installing Elasticsearch is a recent version of Java. Preferably, you should install the latest version of the official Java from www.java.com.

You can get the latest version of Elasticsearch from elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch.

To install Elasticsearch, download and extract the archive file for your platform. For more information, see the Installation topic in the Elasticsearch Reference.

Once you’ve extracted the archive file, Elasticsearch is ready to run. To start it up in the foreground:

cd elasticsearch-<version>
./bin/elasticsearch  

Test it out by opening another terminal window and running the following:

curl 'http://localhost:9200/?pretty'

You should see a response like this:

{
  "name" : "Tom Foster",
  "cluster_name" : "elasticsearch",
  "version" : {
    "number" : "2.1.0",
    "build_hash" : "72cd1f1a3eee09505e036106146dc1949dc5dc87",
    "build_timestamp" : "2015-11-18T22:40:03Z",
    "build_snapshot" : false,
    "lucene_version" : "5.3.1"
  },
  "tagline" : "You Know, for Search"
}

This means that you have an Elasticsearch node up and running, and you can start experimenting with it. A node is a running instance of Elasticsearch. A cluster is a group of nodes with the same cluster.name that are working together to share data and to provide failover and scale. (A single node, however, can form a cluster all by itself.) You can change the cluster.name in the elasticsearch.yml configuration file that’s loaded when you start a node. More information about this and other Important Configuration Changes is provided in the Production Deployment section at the end of this book.

When Elasticsearch is running in the foreground, you can stop it by pressing Ctrl-C.