Why is Elasticsearch 8x. starting interactively but not as a service Ubuntu 20.04?

Question

The tip for fixing this issue on Ubuntu 16.04 does not seem to work. Here's a link to one of the areas of various tips: https://discuss.elastic.co/t/cant-start-elasticsearch-with-ubuntu-16-04/48730/28

There's something missing - I'm on ubuntu 20.04, and ES v8.x, logstash 8.x, kibana 8.x. Manually starting works great. Notes:

1. There was NO "etc/default/elasticsearch" file at all; I created one: (and yes, the user & group do exist; and all ownership has been changed on all the files)

   #Here's the "/etc/default/elasticsearch" file I created: ES_USER="elasticsearch" ES_GROUP="elasticsearch"

   START_DAEMON="true" <-- Is this even needed beyone Ubuntu 16? RESTART_ON_UPGRADE="true"

2. I think I installed via the deb .tar packages and not via APT

3. It runs GREAT; but only "interactively" - so how do we fix the fact that no service exists? I've tried all the related tips, and all other recommendations. - ??

   elasticsearch@ES-VM:/etc/default$ service elasticsearch status Unit elasticsearch.service could not be found.

   root@ES-VM:/etc/default# service elasticsearch start Failed to start elasticsearch.service: Unit elasticsearch.service not found.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

if you installed via the tar file then there's nothing else that is created on the system, no defaults file, no service file. that's a pretty typical linux approach to "installing" anything via a tgz, as it's akin to an "unzip"

if you want to start this as a service then use the deb package or the apt repo, or you will need to create your own service file