Configuration File

The configuration file contains client connection and settings for logging. It looks like this:

---
# Remember, leave a key empty if there is no value.  None will be a string,
# not a Python "NoneType"
elasticsearch:
  client:
    hosts:
      - http://127.0.0.1:9200
    cloud_id:
    ca_certs:
    client_cert:
    client_key:
    verify_certs:
    request_timeout: 30
  other_settings:
    master_only: False
    username:
    password:
    api_key:
      id:
      api_key:
      token:

logging:
  loglevel: INFO
  logfile:
  logformat: default
  blacklist: ['elastic_transport', 'urllib3']

It is a YAML configuration file. The two root keys must be elasticsearch and logging. The subkeys of each of these will be described here.

There are other keys available for the client subkey of the elasticsearch root key, many of which are listed here. The most commonly used ones (listed above) are described as follows:

A hosts definition can be a single value:

hosts: http://127.0.0.1:9200

Or multiple values in the 3 acceptable YAML ways to render sequences, or arrays:

Flow:

hosts: [ "http://10.0.0.1:9200", "http://10.0.0.2:9200" ]

Spanning:

hosts: [ "http://10.0.0.1:9200",
    "http://10.0.0.2:9200" ]

Block:

hosts:
  - http://10.0.0.1:9200
  - http://10.0.0.2:9200

The value should encapsulated in quotes because of the included colon:

cloud_id: 'deployment_name:BIG_HASH_VALUE'

This should be a file path to your CA certificate, or left empty.

ca_certs:

This setting allows the use of a specified CA certificate file to validate the SSL certificate used by Elasticsearch.

There is no default.

'C:\path\to\file'

'/path/to/file'

This should be a file path to a client certificate (public key), or left empty.

client_cert:

Allows the use of a specified SSL client cert file to authenticate to Elasticsearch. The file may contain both an SSL client certificate and an SSL key, in which case client_key is not used. If specifying client_cert, and the file specified does not also contain the key, use client_key to specify the file containing the SSL key. The file must be in PEM format, and the key part, if used, must be an unencrypted key in PEM format as well.

'C:\path\to\file'

'/path/to/file'

This should be a file path to a client key (private key), or left empty.

client_key:

Allows the use of a specified SSL client key file to authenticate to Elasticsearch. If using client_cert and the file specified does not also contain the key, use client_key to specify the file containing the SSL key. The key file must be an unencrypted key in PEM format.

'C:\path\to\file'

'/path/to/file'

This should be True, False or left empty.

verify_certs:

If access to your Elasticsearch instance is protected by SSL encryption, you may set verify_certs to False to disable SSL certificate verification.

Valid use cases for doing so include the use of self-signed certificates that cannot be otherwise verified and would generate error messages.

The default value is True.

This should be an integer number of seconds, or left empty.

request_timeout:

You can change the default client connection timeout value with this setting.

The default value is 30 (seconds) should typically not be changed to be very large. If a longer timeout is necessary for a given action, such as snapshot, restore, or forcemerge, the client timeout can be overridden on per action basis by setting timeout_override in the action options. There are default override values for some of those longer running actions.

This should be True, False or left empty.

master_only:

In some situations, primarily with automated deployments, it makes sense to install Curator on every node. But you wouldn’t want it to run on each node. By setting master_only to True, this is possible. It tests for, and will only continue running on the node that is the elected master.

The default value is False.

The HTTP Basic Authentication username

The HTTP Basic Authentication password

This should be the id portion of an API Key pair.

api_key:
  id:

This setting combined with the other subkey api_key allows API Key authentication to an Elasticsearch instance.

The default is empty.

This should be the api_key portion of an API Key pair.

api_key:
  api_key:

This setting combined with the other subkey id allows API Key authentication to an Elasticsearch instance.

The default is empty.

This should be a base64 encoded representation of an API Key pair.

api_key:
  token:

This setting will override any values provided for the id or api_key subkeys of api_key.

The default is empty.

This should be CRITICAL, ERROR, WARNING, INFO, DEBUG, or left empty.

loglevel:

Set the minimum acceptable log severity to display.

• CRITICAL will only display critical messages.
• ERROR will only display error and critical messages.
• WARNING will display error, warning, and critical messages.
• INFO will display informational, error, warning, and critical messages.
• DEBUG will display debug messages, in addition to all of the above.

The default value is INFO.

This should be a path to a log file, or left empty.

logfile:

'C:\path\to\file'

'/path/to/file'

The default value is empty, which will result in logging to STDOUT, or the console.

This should default, json, logstash, ecs or left empty.

logformat:

The default format looks like:

2016-04-22 11:53:09,972 INFO      Action #1: ACTIONNAME

The json or logstash formats look like:

{"@timestamp": "2016-04-22T11:54:29.033Z", "function": "cli", "linenum": 178,
"loglevel": "INFO", "message": "Action #1: ACTIONNAME", "name": "curator.cli"}

The ecs format looks like:

{"@timestamp":"2020-02-22T11:55:00.022Z","log.level":"info","message":"Action #1:
ACTIONNAME","ecs":{"version":"1.6.0"},"log":{"logger":"curator.cli","origin":
{"file":{"line":178,"name":"cli.py"},"function":"run"},"original":"Action #1:
ACTIONNAME"},"process":{"name":"MainProcess","pid":12345,"thread":
{"id":123456789886543,"name":"MainThread"}}}

The default value is default.

This should be an empty array [], an array of log handler strings, or left empty.

blacklist: ['elastic_transport', 'urllib3']

The default value is ['elastic_transport', 'urllib3'], which will result in logs for the elastic_transport and urllib3 Python modules not being output. These can be quite verbose, so unless you need them to debug an issue, you should accept the default value.