Product release

Elasticsearch 6.0.0-beta2 released

By
Clinton Gormley

Editors note: this post originally had an incorrect statement around the new X-Pack keystore workings.  While the discrepancy wouldn't have an effect on the benefit of the release, we wanted to update this blog to give a more accurate reflection of what's going on behind the scenes.

We are excited to announce the release of Elasticsearch 6.0.0-beta2, based on Lucene 7-SNAPSHOT. This is the fourth in a series of pre-6.0.0 releases designed to let you test out your application with the features and changes coming in 6.0.0, and to give us feedback about any problems that you encounter. Open a bug report today and become an Elastic Pioneer.

IMPORTANT: This is a beta release and is intended for testing purposes only. Indices created in this version will not be compatible with Elasticsearch 6.0.0 GA. Upgrading 6.0.0-beta2 to any other version is not supported.

DO NOT DEPLOY IN PRODUCTION

Also see:

You can read about all the changes in the release notes linked above, but there is one big change worth mentioning below.

Better Security bootstrap experience

In 6.0.0-beta1 we announced that default passwords have been removed  in X-Pack Security and that a bootstrap.password setting should be added to the secure keystore before startup. We have now improved this experience by auto-generating a random seed so as a user you don't need to interact with the keystore unless there are other secrets you wish to store. This all happens automatically for you when X-Pack is installed.

You can still use the setup-passwords command line tool to generate and set strong passwords for all of the internal users.  If you're interested in giving X-Pack a shot, hop on over to the X-Pack installation page for a quick getting started guide.

Conclusion

Please download Elasticsearch 6.0.0-beta2, try it out, and let us know what you think on Twitter (@elastic) or in our forum. You can report any problems on the GitHub issues page.