README

= Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine, scalable data store and vector database optimized for speed and relevance on production-scale workloads. Elasticsearch is the foundation of Elastic's open Stack platform. Search in near real-time over massive datasets, perform vector searches, integrate with generative AI applications, and much more.

Use cases enabled by Elasticsearch include:

 https://www.elastic.co/search-labs/blog/retrieval-augmented-generation-rag[Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)]
 https://www.elastic.co/search-labs/blog/category/vector-search[Vector search]
 Full-text search
 Logs
 Metrics
 Application performance monitoring (APM)
 Security logs

\... and more!

To learn more about Elasticsearch's features and capabilities, see our
https://www.elastic.co/products/elasticsearch[product page].

To access information on https://www.elastic.co/search-labs/blog/categories/ml-research[machine learning innovations] and the latest https://www.elastic.co/search-labs/blog/categories/lucene[Lucene contributions from Elastic], more information can be found in https://www.elastic.co/search-labs[Search Labs].

[[get-started]]
== Get started

The simplest way to set up Elasticsearch is to create a managed deployment with
https://www.elastic.co/cloud/as-a-service[Elasticsearch Service on Elastic
Cloud].

If you prefer to install and manage Elasticsearch yourself, you can download
the latest version from
https://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch[elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch].

=== Run Elasticsearch locally

////
IMPORTANT: This content is replicated in the Elasticsearch repo. See run-elasticsearch-locally.asciidoc.
Ensure both files are in sync.

https://github.com/elastic/start-local is the source of truth.
////

[WARNING]
====
DO NOT USE THESE INSTRUCTIONS FOR PRODUCTION DEPLOYMENTS.

This setup is intended for local development and testing only.
====

Quickly set up Elasticsearch and Kibana in Docker for local development or testing, using the https://github.com/elastic/start-local?tab=readme-ov-file-try-elasticsearch-and-kibana-locally[start-local script].

ℹ️ For more detailed information about the start-local setup, refer to the https://github.com/elastic/start-local[README on GitHub].

==== Prerequisites

- If you don't have Docker installed, https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop[download and install Docker Desktop] for your operating system.
- If you're using Microsoft Windows, then install https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install[Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)].

==== Trial license
This setup comes with a one-month trial license that includes all Elastic features.

After the trial period, the license reverts to Free and open - Basic.
Refer to https://www.elastic.co/subscriptions[Elastic subscriptions] for more information.

==== Run start-local

To set up Elasticsearch and Kibana locally, run the start-local script:

[source,sh]
----
curl -fsSL https://elastic.co/st

Top issues

Latest release

Downloads: https://elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch
Release notes: https://www.elastic.co/docs/release-notes/elasticsearchelasticsearch-9.5.6-release-notes