* Add MSI installation to documentation
Move installation documentation for Windows with the .zip archive into the zip and tar installation documentation, and clearly indicate any differences for installing on macOS/Linux and Windows.
* Separate out installation with .zip on Windows
For the Windows service, JAVA_HOME should be set to the path to the
JDK. We should make this clear in the docs to help users avoid
frustrating startup problems.
Relates #24260
Elasticsearch can be run in a few different ways:
- from the command line on Linux and Windows
- as a service on Linux and Windows
on both 32-bit client and 64-bit server VMs. We strive for a great
out-of-the-box experience any of these combinations but today it is
lacking on 32-bit client JVMs and on the Windows service. There are two
deficiencies that arise:
- on any 32-bit client JVM we fail to start out of the box because we
force the server JVM in jvm.options
- when installing the Windows service, the thread stack size must be
specified in jvm.options
This commit attempts to address these deficiencies.
We should continue to force the server JVM because there are systems
where the server JVM is not active by default (e.g., the 32-bit JDK on
Windows). This does mean that if a user tries to run with a client JVM
they will see a failure message at startup but this is the best that we
can do if we want to continue to force the server JVM. Thus, this commit
at least documents this situation.
To improve the situation with installing the Windows service, this
commit adds a default setting for the thread stack size. This default is
chosen based on the default thread stack size across all 64-bit server
JVMs. This means that if a user tries to run with a 32-bit JVM they
could otherwise see significantly higher memory usage (this situation is
complicated, it's really only on Windows where the extra memory usage is
egregious, but cutting into the 32-bit address space on any system is
bad). So this commit makes it so that the out-of-the-box experience is
improved for the Windows service on 64-bit server JVMs and we document
the need to adjust this setting on 32-bit JVMs.
Again, we are focusing on the out-of-the-box experience here and this
means optimizing for the best experience on any 64-bit server JVM as
this covers the vast majority of the user base. The users that are on
32-bit JVMs will suffer a little bit but at least now any user on any
64-bit server JVM can start Elasticsearch out of the box.
Finally, we fix some references to the jvm.options documentation.
Relates #21920
With the unified release process across the elastic stack, download
links for all products are changing. This change updates docs referring
to the old download and packages urls.
Note that this change also updates the plugin installation command as
the url for downloads is being changed to be consistent with that for
packages (both plural).
This commit adds a note regarding the difference in configuration for
the Windows service heap size from any other installation of
Elasticsearch.
Relates #18606
This commit removes the ability to specify a custom plugins
path. Instead, the plugins path will always be a subdirectory called
"plugins" off of the home directory.
Today when parsing settings during bootstrap, we add a system property
for every Elasticsearch setting. Additionally, settings can be set via
system properties. This commit simplifies this situation.
- settings are no longer propogated to system properties
- system properties can not be used to set settings
- the "es." prefix on settings is no longer required (nor permitted)
- test logging has a dedicated system property (tests.logger.level)
Relates #18198
This commit adds a note to the Windows service docs regarding the thread
stack size setting for the Windows service installer. As the Apache
Commons procrun daemon requires that this setting be explicitly set, we
need a value to be set when the service is installed. The right place
for this setting is the jvm.options file. We do not want to ship with a
hard-coded value here because we do not want to override the default
setting on other platforms, and the right default depends on whether or
not the end-user is on a 32-bit versus a 64-bit Windows system.
Relates #18324
This commit adds a new configuration file jvm.options to centralize and
simplify management of JVM options. This separates the configuration of
the JVM from the packaging scripts (bin/elasticsearch*, bin/service.bat,
and init.d/elasticsearch) simplifying end-user operational management of
custom JVM options.