A Simple Guide to Installing Elasticsearch and Kibana with Docker Compose

If you’re looking to get started with Elasticsearch and Kibana, this guide will walk you through the setup using Docker Compose. Elasticsearch is a powerful search engine, and Kibana is its data visualization partner. Together, they make exploring and analyzing large datasets easier.

What Are Elasticsearch and Kibana?

• Elasticsearch: A search and analytics engine built on Lucene, designed for handling large datasets. It indexes, stores, and queries JSON documents quickly and scales well by distributing data across nodes.
• Kibana: A visualization tool for interacting with Elasticsearch data, allowing you to create dashboards, charts, and reports to understand your data better.

Why Use Docker Compose for Elasticsearch and Kibana?

Using Docker Compose, you can easily set up both Elasticsearch and Kibana with a single configuration file. This method is fast, scalable, and suitable for both development and production environments.

Step-by-Step: Setting Up Elasticsearch and Kibana

1. Create a Project Folder
2. Open a terminal and create a directory for your Docker setup:

mkdir elasticsearch_kibana && cd elasticsearch_kibana

Create a docker-compose.yml File

In this directory, create a new file named docker-compose.yml and add the following configuration:

version: '3.7'

services:
  elasticsearch:
    image: elasticsearch:7.9.2
    container_name: elasticsearch
    environment:
      - discovery.type=single-node
    ports:
      - "9200:9200"
    networks:
      - elk-network

  kibana:
    image: kibana:7.9.2
    container_name: kibana
    environment:
      - ELASTICSEARCH_HOSTS=http://elasticsearch:9200
    ports:
      - "5601:5601"
    depends_on:
      - elasticsearch
    networks:
      - elk-network

networks:
  elk-network:
    driver: bridge

Run Elasticsearch and Kibana

In your terminal, navigate to the directory where you saved docker-compose.yml and start the containers:

docker-compose up -d

• Elasticsearch will be available at http://localhost:9200

• Kibana can be accessed at http://localhost:5601

Stopping the Containers

To stop Elasticsearch and Kibana, run:

docker-compose down

Summary

With this setup, you can start exploring Elasticsearch and creating visualizations in Kibana within minutes. This guide uses Docker Compose to simplify your development environment setup. To customize, adjust versions or add configuration options in docker-compose.yml as needed.

Why Elasticsearch and Kibana?

Together, they provide a scalable solution for log management, performance monitoring, and big data analysis. Install them using Docker Compose and start making sense of your data today!