eklavvya/elasticsearch-light-testing

Docker image: elasticsearch-light-testing

A lightweight Docker image running Elasticsearch 9.2.4, optimized for development and integration testing.

Note This has been adopted from https://github.com/Sanne/elasticsearch-light-testing

Yet another Elasticsearch docker image?

The official image from Elastic is designed to be flexible and comes with safe defaults, to make sure it's a reasonable starting point for many use cases. For quick integration testing we need mostly small indexes and use "throw away" cheap storage, which leads me to reconfigure most of the official image. Not least I don't need to run the additional plugins it comes with, and no need to waste 2G of heap for the JVM tuning.

To make sure our software behaves as intended, we'll also strictly ban deprecated features and not recommended settings, have the logger spit out a warning for anything dodgy.

Finally, we disable clustering. This image is certainly not intended for complex failure testing nor performance / scalability tests, for any of those use the official images.

This image is based on the official Elasticsearch 9.2.4 Docker image with custom lightweight configuration.

How to run it

Fetch it

docker pull eklavvya/elasticsearch-light-testing

Start it

docker run --ulimit memlock=-1:-1 -it --net=host --rm=true --memory-swappiness=0 --name es-it eklavvya/elasticsearch-light-testing

Done!

Keep in mind that this image is meant for development in quick iterations; the above options will terminate the container on CTRL+C and remove any data stored.

Customization & tuning

I highly recommend using tmpfs for storage as Docker is otherwise not very efficient; direct host network usage also helps with efficiency:

docker run --ulimit memlock=-1:-1 -ti --tmpfs /run --tmpfs=/usr/share/elasticsearch/volatile/data:uid=1000 --tmpfs=/usr/share/elasticsearch/volatile/logs:uid=1000 --net=host --name es-it eklavvya/elasticsearch-light-testing

Unfortunately the parameters format Docker requires for tmpfs changes across various versions: you might need to adapt the above suggestion.

Get rid of it after testing:

docker stop es-it && docker rm es-it

Build it locally

docker build -t eklavvya/elasticsearch-light-testing .

Don't forget to change customtest consistently in the run script:

docker run --ulimit memlock=-1:-1 -it --net=host --rm=true --memory-swappiness=0 --name es-it eklavvya/elasticsearch-light-testing

Configuration Details

This image includes the following lightweight optimizations:

• Elasticsearch Version: 9.2.4 (official base image)
• JVM Heap Size: 512MB (optimized for testing)
• Security: Disabled for easier development
• Monitoring: Disabled to reduce overhead
• Machine Learning: Disabled to reduce resource usage
• Single Node: Configured for standalone testing
• Volatile Storage: Uses /usr/share/elasticsearch/volatile/ for data and logs

Troubleshooting

Common Issues with Elasticsearch 9.x Container Fails to Start with Security Manager Error: If you see errors about "Security Manager is not supported", ensure you're using the latest image version which removes incompatible JVM flags.

Memory Issues: The default 512MB heap is optimized for testing. Increase heap size if needed:

docker run -e "ES_JAVA_OPTS=-Xms1g -Xmx1g" eklavvya/elasticsearch-light-testing

Version Verification:

Always verify the correct version is running:

curl -s http://localhost:9200 | jq '.version.number' # Expected: "9.2.4"

Health Check

After starting the container, verify it's running:

curl http://localhost:9200/_cluster/health

Registered on DockerHub

https://hub.docker.com/r/eklavvya/elasticsearch-light-testing