Elasticsearch, Failed to obtain node lock, is the following location writable

Question

Elasticsearch won't start using ./bin/elasticsearch. It raises the following exception:

- ElasticsearchIllegalStateException[Failed to obtain node lock, is the following location writable?: [/home/user1/elasticsearch-1.4.4/data/elasticsearch]

I checked the permissions on the same location and the location has 777 permissions on it and is owned by user1.

ls -al /home/user1/elasticsearch-1.4.4/data/elasticsearch

drwxrwxrwx  3 user1 wheel 4096 Mar  8 13:24 .
drwxrwxrwx  3 user1 wheel 4096 Mar  8 13:00 ..
drwxrwxrwx 52 user1 wheel 4096 Mar  8 13:51 nodes

What is the problem?

Trying to run elasticsearch 1.4.4 on linux without root access.

Answer 1

I had an orphaned Java process related to Elasticsearch. Killing it solved the lock issue.

ps aux | grep 'java'
kill -9 <PID>

Answer 2

I got this same error message, but things were mounted fine and the permissions were all correctly assigned.

Turns out that I had an 'orphaned' elasticsearch process that was not being killed by the normal stop command.

I had to manually kill the process and then restarting elasticsearch worked again.

Answer 3

the reason is another instance is running!
first find the id of running elastic.

ps aux | grep 'elastic'

then kill using kill -9 <PID_OF_RUNNING_ELASTIC>.
There were some answers to remove node.lock file but that didn't help since the running instance will make it again!