Version: 6.x-21
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Community

Search Guard Community Edition

Overview

The Community Edition of Search Guard is free, and you can use it for production and non-production systems. It includes TLS encryption on REST and on transport layer, HTTP Basic Authentication, the Internal User Database authentication backend and Kibana session management.

The Community Edition does not require a license. To use it, just install the Enterprise Edition and disable all commercial features by adding the following line to elasticsearch.yml and restart the node:

searchguard.enterprise_modules_enabled: false

Setting this flag will disable any commercial module or custom authentication domain and will run only the free Community features of Search Guard.

HTTP License endpoint

If you are unsure whether you are running the free Community Edition or not, you can visit the HTTP license endpoint of Search Guard like:

https://<Elasticsearch Host>:<HTTP Port>/_searchguard/license

For example:

https://example.com:9200/_searchguard/license

This will return license information in JSON format. If you are running the Community Edition, the following information is displayed:

...
sg_license: {
  msgs: [
    "No license required because enterprise modules are not enabled."
  ],
  license_required: false
}
...

Logfile

On startup, Search Guard will print license information to the Elasticsearch logfile on INFO level. If you are running the Community Edition you will find the following entry:

Search Guard License Info: No license needed because enterprise modules are not enabled

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