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Disable Search Guard Plugin

Databases are precious. Definitely, you will not want to left your production database unprotected. Hence, KubeDB ship with Search Guard plugin integrated with it. It provides you authentication, authorization and TLS security. However, you can disable Search Guard plugin. You have to set spec.authPlugin field of Elasticsearch object to None.

This tutorial will show you how to disable Search Guard plugin for Elasticsearch database in KubeDB.

Before You Begin

At first, you need to have a Kubernetes cluster, and the kubectl command-line tool must be configured to communicate with your cluster. If you do not already have a cluster, you can create one by using kind.

Now, install KubeDB cli on your workstation and KubeDB operator in your cluster following the steps here.

To keep things isolated, this tutorial uses a separate namespace called demo throughout this tutorial.

$ kubectl create ns demo
namespace/demo created

$ kubectl get ns demo
NAME    STATUS  AGE
demo    Active  5s

Note: YAML files used in this tutorial are stored in docs/examples/elasticsearch folder in GitHub repository kubedb/docs.

Create Elasticsearch

In order to disable Search Guard, you have to set spec.authPlugin field of Elasticsearch object to None. Below is the YAML of Elasticsearch object that will be created in this tutorial.

apiVersion: kubedb.com/v1alpha2
kind: Elasticsearch
metadata:
  name: es-sg-disabled
  namespace: demo
spec:
  version: searchguard-7.9.3
  storage:
    storageClassName: "standard"
    accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
    resources:
      requests:
        storage: 1Gi

Let’s create the Elasticsearch object we have shown above,

$ kubectl create -f https://github.com/kubedb/docs/raw/v2023.01.17/docs/examples/elasticsearch/search-guard/es-sg-disabled.yaml
elasticsearch.kubedb.com/es-sg-disabled created

Wait for Elasticsearch to be ready,

$ kubectl get es -n demo es-sg-disabled
NAME             VERSION   STATUS    AGE
es-sg-disabled   6.3-v1    Running   27m

Connect to Elasticsearch Database

As we have disabled Search Guard plugin, we no longer require username and password to connect with our Elasticsearch database.

At first, forward port 9200 of es-sg-disabled-0 pod. Run following command in a separate terminal,

$ kubectl port-forward -n demo es-sg-disabled-0 9200
Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:9200 -> 9200
Forwarding from [::1]:9200 -> 9200

Now, we can connect with the database at localhost:9200.

Let’s check health of our Elasticsearch database.

$ curl "localhost:9200/_cluster/health?pretty"

{
  "cluster_name" : "es-sg-disabled",
  "status" : "green",
  "timed_out" : false,
  "number_of_nodes" : 1,
  "number_of_data_nodes" : 1,
  "active_primary_shards" : 0,
  "active_shards" : 0,
  "relocating_shards" : 0,
  "initializing_shards" : 0,
  "unassigned_shards" : 0,
  "delayed_unassigned_shards" : 0,
  "number_of_pending_tasks" : 0,
  "number_of_in_flight_fetch" : 0,
  "task_max_waiting_in_queue_millis" : 0,
  "active_shards_percent_as_number" : 100.0
}

Cleaning up

To cleanup the Kubernetes resources created by this tutorial, run:

$ kubectl patch -n demo es/es-sg-disabled -p '{"spec":{"terminationPolicy":"WipeOut"}}' --type="merge"
$ kubectl delete -n demo es/es-sg-disabled

$ kubectl delete ns demo

Next Steps

• Learn how to create TLS certificates.
• Learn how to generate search-guard configuration.
• Want to hack on KubeDB? Check our contribution guidelines.