use elasticsearch in gitlab-ci

Question

I tried to use the elasticsearch service in gitlab -ci by adding:

image: python:3.6
services:
  - elasticsearch:2.4

in my .gitlab-ci.yml

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work (I cannot a connection refused on http://127.0.0.1:9200/). Any idea?

I also tried to launch the docker image with:

test:
  script:
  - docker run -d elasticsearch

But docker is not present...

Answer 1

For Elasticsearch 7, a working config looks like this:

test-elasticsearch:
  stage: test
  services:
    - name: "docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.10.1"
      alias: "elasticsearch"
      command: [ "bin/elasticsearch", "-Expack.security.enabled=false", "-Ediscovery.type=single-node" ]
  script:
    - curl "http://elasticsearch:9200/_cat/health"

However, you can also have a look whether there is an embedded elasticsearch available for your runtime, e.g. for Java there are "testcontainers": https://www.testcontainers.org/modules/elasticsearch/. That way it's also easier to run tests locally for devs, since they don't need to worry about spinning up elasticsearch first.