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Elasticsearch on a Raspberry Pi

Deploying Powerful Software on Inexpensive Hardware

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Elasticsearch on a Raspberry Pi

This is a step-by-step on installing Elastic Search on a Raspberry Pi. While I don't honestly think having a cluster of Raspberry Pi computers running Elastic Search is a true enterprise solution, I think there could be something to this in the future. As cheap as hardware keeps getting, it's entirely reasonable to believe that a myriad ARM-based Systems-on-a-Chip (SOC) could be a completely feasible cluster solution. Today you can pay $40 for a single little Raspberry Pi. If you forked out $4000, you could have 100 of these tiny machines all running Elastic Search in memory. What does one VM slice cost an enterprise right now? Just sayin'…

  • Format your SD card (I used a 32GB, a 64GB card would be nice) using this formatter.
  • Download NOOBS for Raspberry Pi here.
  • Copy the files to the card, insert into the Raspberry Pi, and boot.
  • When prompted, choose to install Raspbian.
  • After install is complete, reboot to command line (bash shell)
  • Install Oracle Java (7, at the time of this posting), using "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-jdk"
  • Create a directory to store Elastic Search using "sudo mkdir /usr/share/elasticsearch".
  • Change to the directory using "cd /usr/share/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-0.90.7".
  • Download Elastic Search (v0.90.7 at the time of this posting), using "http://download.elasticsearch.org/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-0.90.7.tar.gz".

Please note you may have to change the file name if the version has increased since this article.

  • Extract the zipped file: "sudo tar -zxvf elasticsearch-0.90.7.tar.gz"
  • Delete the archive: "sudo rm elasticsearch-0.90.7.tar.gz".
  • Run Elastic Search! "sudo bin/elasticsearch"
  • Verify the install: "curl -XGET http://localhost:9200/"
  • Install the _head plugin: "sudo bin/plugin -install mobz/elasticsearch-head".
  • Get your local IP address: "sudo ifconfig". Look for "inet addr". Copy your IP address.
  • From any browser on the network, navigate to "http://[your Raspberry Pi IP]:9200/_plugin/head/".

Start searching!