Building From Source

elasticsearch codebase is hosted on github, and its just a fork away. To get started with the code, start by either forking or cloning the repo. One can also just download the master code in either zip or tar.gz.

Once downloaded, building an elasticsearch distribution is simple. You’ll need Apache Maven or see below for IDE integration. Then compile ElasticSearch via:

$ mvn package -DskipTests

If you are running it for the first time, go get a cup of coffee (or better yet, a beer), it will take some time to download all the dependencies elasticsearch has. Once finished, a full distribution of the elasticsearch will be created under target/releases/.

In order to use it, just get either the deb package, the zip or tar.gz installation, extract it, and fire up elasticsearch -f. You now have a fully functional master based elasticsearch version running.

Hacking

Maven is supported by all major IDEs these days: