Use Curator - Best Practices| Alibaba Cloud Documentation Center

Install Elasticsearch Curator

Purchase an Alibaba Cloud ECS instance in the same VPC network as your Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch instance. This example uses an ECS instance that runs CentOS 7.3 64-bit.
Run the following command:
1. Install Elasticsearch Curator:
```
pip install elasticsearch-curator
```
  Note
  - We recommend that you install Elasticsearch Curator 5.6.0. This version supports Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch 5.5.3 and 6.3.2.
  - Curator and Elasticsearch version compatibility.
2. View the version of the Curator:
```
curator --version
```
  Returned version information:
```
curator, version 5.6.0
```

Singleton command line interface

You can use curator_cli to perform an action.
Singleton command line interface.
Note
- You can perform only one action each time.
- Not all of the actions can be performed by using Curator, for example, Alias and Restore.

Schedule tasks using Crontab

You can use the crontab and curator commands to schedule a task to perform multiple actions.

Curator command:

curator [OPTIONS] ACTION_FILE
Options:
  --config PATH  Path to configuration file.  Default: ~/.curator/curator.yml
  --dry-run      Do not perform any changes. 
  --version      Show the version and exit. 
  --help         Show this message and exit.

When you run the curator command, you must specify the config.yml file (official reference).
When you run the curator command, you must specify the action.yml file (official reference).

Hot-warm architecture practice

Use Curator to migrate indexes from hot nodes to warm nodes (official reference).

Migrate indexes from hot nodes to warm nodes

Create the config.yml file in the /usr/curator/ path as follows:
Notice
- hosts: Replace hosts with the address of the Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch instance that you need to access. In this example, the private address of the Elasticsearch instance is used.
- http_auth: Replace http_auth with the username and password that are used to log on to the Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch instance.
```
client:
  hosts:
    - http://es-cn-0pp0z9p2v00031234.elasticsearch.aliyuncs.com
  port: 9200
  url_prefix:
  use_ssl: False
  certificate:
  client_cert:
  client_key:
  ssl_no_validate: False
  http_auth: user:password
  timeout: 30
  master_only: False
logging:
  loglevel: INFO
  logfile:
  logformat: default
  blacklist: ['elasticsearch', 'urllib3']
```

Create the action.yml file in the /usr/curator/ path as follows:

Note

The following content migrates indexes created 30 minutes ago and starting with logstash- from hot nodes to warm nodes.
You can customize the following content based on your business needs.

actions:
  1:
    action: allocation
    description: "Apply shard allocation filtering rules to the specified indices"
    options:
      key: box_type
      value: warm
      allocation_type: require
      wait_for_completion: true
      timeout_override:
      continue_if_exception: false
      disable_action: false
    filters:
    - filtertype: pattern
      kind: prefix
      value: logstash-
    - filtertype: age
      source: creation_date
      direction: older
      timestring: '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S'
      unit: minutes
      unit_count: 30

Check whether the curator command can run normally:

curator --config /usr/curator/config.yml /usr/curator/action.yml

The following information is returned when the command runs normally:

2019-02-12 20:11:30,607 INFO      Preparing Action ID: 1, "allocation" 
2019-02-12 20:11:30,612 INFO      Trying Action ID: 1, "allocation": Apply shard allocation filtering rules to the specified indices 
2019-02-12 20:11:30,693 INFO      Updating index setting {'index.routing.allocation.require.box_type': 'warm'} 
2019-02-12 20:12:57,925 INFO      Health Check for all provided keys passed. 
2019-02-12 20:12:57,925 INFO      Action ID: 1, "allocation" completed. 
2019-02-12 20:12:57,925 INFO      Job completed.

Run the crontab command to run the curator command at an interval of 15 minutes:
```
*/15 * * * * curator --config /usr/curator/config.yml /usr/curator/action.yml
```