Request for Detailed Elastic Search 8 upgrade info

Technical assistance
1

Infos:

  • Used Zammad version: 6.3.1
  • Used Zammad installation type: package
  • Operating system: Ubuntu 20.04
  • Browser + version: N/A

Not strictly a Zammad request, but an elastic search request for the configuration to use with Zammad.

I am looking for assistance with the process of moving from ElasticSearch 7.17.x on Ubuntu 20.04 to ElasticSearch 8.x

I see in the zammad docs there is an additional requirement for authentication in 8, but the install instructions still default to assuming 7.x is being installed. There is passing referenced to adding the ElasticSearch 8 username and password into the Zammad config with two rails commands.

When upgrading to 8, Elastic search doesn’t ask for credentials to be created and for some reason when I try to run the bin/elasticsearch-setup-passwords interactive command to configure the default account, Ubuntu says the command is not found.

I’ve rolled back to 7.17 for now, but would like to move forward without waiting until 7.17 is EOL.

2

I personally haven’t found a nice and convenient way to upgrade ES yet. Their documentation seems to have some plot holes. Generally:

The plot holes result in ES running without https and authentication, as you already noticed.
You can fight yourself through their docs regarding authentication and such (Built-in users | Elasticsearch Guide [8.15] | Elastic) … but, for me personally…

If Zammad is the only thing that uses Elasticsearch (maybe with Grafana) then I prefer to nuke the Elasticsearch ibstallation. Make sure to remove the elasticsearch directory in etc and the data storage somewhere in var. then install ES8.

A fair warning though: My outlined process involves temporarily removing Zammad. You should only proceed if your comfortable rocking on your servers console and have snapshots. It’s not the most trivial process.