ElasticSearch 5 in Travis-CI

tl;dr; Here's a working .travis.yml file that works with ElasticSearch 5.1.1

I had to jump through hoops to get Travis-CI to run with ElasticSearch 5.1.1 and I thought I'd share. If you just do:

services:
  - elasticsearch

This is from the Travis-CI documentation but this installs ElasticSearch 1.4. Not good enough. The instructions on the same page for using higher versions did not work for me.

To get a specific version you need to download it yourself and install it with dpkg -i but the problem is that if you want to use ElasticSearch version 5, you need to have Java 1.8. The short answer is that this is how you install Java 1.8:

addons:
  apt:
    packages:
      - oracle-java8-set-default

But now you need to sudo so you need to add sudo: true in your .travis.yml. Bummer, because it makes the build a bit slower. However, a necessary evil.

The critical line I use to install it is this:

curl -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-5.1.1.deb && \
sudo dpkg -i --force-confnew elasticsearch-5.1.1.deb && \
sudo service elasticsearch start

I thought I could "upgrade" the existing install, but that breaks thinks. In other words you have to remove the services: - elasticsearch line or else it can't upgrade.

Now, during debugging I was not getting errors on the line:

sudo service elasticsearch start

So I add this to be sure the right version got installed:

#!/bin/bash
curl -v http://localhost:9200/

and then I can see that the right version was installed. It should look something like this:

* About to connect() to localhost port 9200 (#0)
*   Trying 127.0.0.1... connected
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.22.0 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.22.0 OpenSSL/1.0.1 zlib/1.2.3.4 libidn/1.23 librtmp/2.3
> Host: localhost:9200
> Accept: */*
> 
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< content-type: application/json; charset=UTF-8
< content-length: 327
< 
{
  "name" : "m_acpqT",
  "cluster_name" : "elasticsearch",
  "cluster_uuid" : "b4_KnK6KQmSx64C9o-81Ug",
  "version" : {
    "number" : "5.1.1",
    "build_hash" : "5395e21",
    "build_date" : "2016-12-06T12:36:15.409Z",
    "build_snapshot" : false,
    "lucene_version" : "6.3.0"
  },
  "tagline" : "You Know, for Search"
}
* Connection #0 to host localhost left intact
* Closing connection #0

Note the line that says "number" : "5.1.1",.

So, yay! Hopefully this will help someone else because it took me quite a while to get right.