Running Elastic without the Trial License

Question

Background: I'm trying to use the Elastic stack (Elastic, Logstash & Kibana), but I have no money to pay. I don't mind using the parts that are closed source, as long as they are free. In this regard, I'm trying to understand how Elastic Licensing works.

We Opened X-Pack seems to suggest that after Elastic 6.3 the X-Pack Code is included (though with a different license). I also understand that some parts of X-Pack are free, but other's are not. This is all a bit confusing.

Objective: I would like to run Elastic stack with all of the free stuff, and none of the paid stuff.

What I have done so far: I'm on Linux but I have chosen not to use the distribution package repositories i.e. I would like to use the downloads provided by Elastic Co. For Elastic and Kibana, I have downloaded and extracted the tar.gz version 6.5.4 GA Release from https://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch and https://www.elastic.co/downloads/kibana For most part, I did not set any options, so I assume my setup used the defaults. Both Elastic and Kibana started up, without any issues. I'm running these on the commandline for now.

From the logs, I noticed that the install had been granted a trial version license for 14 days or something like that. Since I did not want to use the license, I used the Delete license API i.e. I ran

curl -X DELETE "localhost:9200/_xpack/license"

This worked in a sense i.e. I got the {"acknowledged": true} response. I thought this would get rid of the xpack stuff that was not free, but unfortunately, it didn't. I still saw some of the x-pack stuff in the startup.

I then tried to do what is mentioned in Uninstalling X-Pack. I know this is old, but I did not know how to do it in the newer version. Anyway, if I run the commands:

bin/elasticsearch-plugin remove x-pack

I get the error:

ERROR: plugin [x-pacl] not found; run 'elasticsearch-plugin list' to get the list of installed plugins

And elasticsearch-plugin list doesn't return anything. If I run

bin/kibana-plugin remove x-pack

I get:

Unable to remove plugin because of error: “You are using the standard distribution of kibana. Please install the OSS-only distribution to remove the X-Pack features.”

Now my Kibana does not run, complaining that:

Elasticsearch cluster did not respond with license information..

i.e. it does start up, but when you go to the webpage it tells me that it Cannot connect to the Elastic cluster

Questions:

• What is the OSS-only distribution and where do I download it?
• Is there anyway to not use the trial version license of elastic and use all of the parts that are free (as in cost/price) and would not expire after x-days? I would like to use all the X-Pack stuff that's free, and not use the X-Pack stuff that's paid.

Answer 1

Since version 6.5 there is not a standalone x-Pack plugin anymore, all the x-pack features are integrated in the Elastic Stack.

If you want to run the Elastic Stack using only the free features, which means that you will use the free basic license, you need to set your license in the elasticsearch.yml file using the line below (more info):

xpack.license.self_generated.type: basic

This will disable the trial and enable only the free features.

If you want to run the stack using only the features licensed under Apache 2.0 license (the open source version), you need to download the oss packages for elasticsearch, kibana and logstash.

You can download it here: elasticsearch-oss,kibana-oss and logstash-oss

You can see the differences between the OSS version and the Free Basic license in the subscriptions page.

Answer 2

Elastic have published a apache-only-open-source distro with just free components:

https://www.elastic.co/es/downloads/elasticsearch-oss

On the other side, AWS have taken last apache-open source versions from Elastic-Apache and have created a new open source distro forking from that and including new functionalities, and functionalities that are no more open source in last Elastic version, like Kibana

https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/downloads.html

To know more about the licenses war: https://grafana.com/blog/2019/03/20/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-oss-licensing-war-part-1./