How to start a Elasticsearch Docker Container with SSL/TLS encryption

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In this story you will learn how to start a Elasticsearch Docker container with two nodes and SSL/TLS encryption. We will use Docker Compose to manage the containers.

Preparing the Environment

Let’s get started by creating an empty directory and creating the following files inside it:

You can find all these files in my Github Repository.

instances.yml:

This file will be used by elasticsearch-certutil to create our certificates.

.env:

This file holds the environment variables:

1. The first variable is used by Docker Compose as a prefix for all volumes and networks created by docker-compose.
2. The second variable is the path inside the container where the certificates are kept.
3. The third variable is the password to your Elasticsearch Instance. Don’t forget to change it 🙂

create-certs.yml:

Docker compose file to create a volume certs using elasticsearch-certutil with the certificates.

And finally docker-compose.yml:

This is the Docker Compose file responsible for managing our two nodes of Elasticsearch. You can see they use the Docker Elasticsearch image provided by the Elastic team and already have a series of properties related to SSL and TLS defined.

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Running everything

Cool! Now that we have our environment set, let’s get everything running.

Let’s first create our volume with our certificates by running:

docker-compose -f create-certs.yml run --rm create_certs

This only needs to be run once. Our container will run, create our certificates inside a volume and then our container will be removed.

Now, let’s run our Elasticsearch Cluster by running:

docker-compose up -d

This will load up our two containers, which will use the volume we created previously. We can see in the Docker dashboard that they are actually running:

Docker Dashboard

Cool! Everything is running now! Let’s test it by downloading our certificate:

docker cp es01:/usr/share/elasticsearch/config/certificates/ca/ca.crt /tmp

Which will be saved in our tmp/ca.crt path. Then we can do a GET request:

curl --cacert /tmp/ca.crt -u elastic:PleaseChangeMe https://localhost:9200

And we should have a response like:

And that’s it! I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial. See you next time!

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