How to set JAVA_HOME for all users for "elasticsearch" program?

I'm trying to set JAVA_HOME for elasticsearch but no luck till now.

I tried to set it in .bashrc, etc/environment, etc/.profile all fail.

this is the command I use to run elasticsearch:

sudo /etc/init.d/elasticsearch start

I tried debug the JAVA_HOME variable in terminal like this:

1. echo $JAVA_HOME
2. sudo echo $JAVA_HOME

I got the result /home/mockie/softwares/jdk1.8.0_45 for the both which is correct path for my JAVA.

I also tried debug /etc/init.d/elasticsearch like this:

echo "$JAVA_HOME/dodol"
exit 1

and the result was empty and only return "/dodol".

this is full code for etc/init.d/elasticsearch :

and this is my etc/environment:

 PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games" JAVA_HOME=/home/mockie/softwares/jdk1.8.0_45

but when I try this :

$ sudo su
$ /etc/init.d/elasticsearch start

and it works! but what I want is to use sudo /etc/init.d/elasticsearch start without sudo su first. is it possible?

26

4 Answers

The problem turned out to be the SysV script /etc/init.d/elasticsearch itself.

In the script the PID_DIR variable is set as :

PID_DIR=/var/run/elasticsearch 

but there is no such directory exists and there is command to create it in the script too.

The NAME and PID_FILE are set as:

NAME=elasticsearch
PID_FILE="$PID_DIR/$NAME.pid" 

So when the PID_FILE is trying to create a file "$PID_DIR/$NAME.pid" (/var/run/elasticsearch/elasticseach.pid) in $PID_DIR (/var/run/elasticsearch/), it is getting:

touch: cannot touch ‘/var/run/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.pid’: No such file or directory 

error as the directory /var/run/elasticsearch does not exists already.

About the JAVA_HOME variable, the script /etc/init.d/elasticsearch is not using the system's variable rather using/creating its own version of the variable that is well defined in the script.

According to the script, if JAVA_HOME is not set in /etc/default/elasticsearch it will try to set it manually by searching for certain files in certain directories, otherwise it will left it blank.

3

I had the same problem, what I did was to create a /etc/default/elastic file with the next line inside:

JAVA_HOME=/pathto/jdk

As mentioned here EnvironmentVariables

You can set system-wide environmental variables with three ways:

• /etc/environment
• /etc/profile
• /etc/profile.d/*.sh

You could use for example /etc/profile. Execute this on your machine

sudo echo "JAVA_HOME=/home/mockie/softwares/jdk1.8.0_45" >> /etc/profile

5

I had the problem, the solutions provided above probably work. however in case anybody wants to do the thing without restarting the server having just installed java, you can do what I did (which is probably wrong, but it worked).

Modify:

/etc/systemd/system/

add this line:

Environment=JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/jdk-11.0.4/

in the [service] section You may have to replace /usr/lib/jvm/jdk-11.0.4/ with your actual java installation.

I hope this helps, and I apologise to the elasticsearch team for modifying their files, clearly I have no business modifying default files.

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