How to do secure Elasticsearch free with xpack security

Yesterday, I have invested a couple of hours to secure eleasticsearch. 

Elasticserch comes with a couple of security features. 

If you need advance elasticsearch security features you need to have a look elasticsearch subscription features. 

In this post, I would like to secure elasticsearch free with enabling basic authentication with the help of xpack security option. 

I will use Docker to run elasticserach. To create users and passwords I will user elasticsearch commands in the running docker image. 

I assume you have docker installed and running on your host machine and you know basics of docker. Here is the docker-compose file we will use : 

Then you need to run the following command to login your docker container. 

docker exec -it your-elastic-container-id /bin/bash

Then, we need to add a user with a password and role. 

Elasticsearch xpack comes with build-in roles.

 

I will create a user with superuser role just for demo purposes. 

elasticsearch-users useradd myuser -p mypassword -r superuser

Since xpack is activated, now you can use this username and password 

with basic authentication to access elasticsearch api