Keeping the ElasticSearch service running on an Ubuntu server
A local ElasticSearch instance powers the Chinese example sentence search feature on Chinese Boost. This works fine, but the ElasticSearch instance has a habit of crashing about once a day.
While I’ve been investigating why it crashes and how to prevent that from happening, I also wanted to have the EC2 Ubuntu server it runs on restart the ElasticSearch service automatically as a workaround.
This can be done using systemd.
You can add extra config for the elasticsearch service with this command:
EDITOR=vim sudo systemctl edit elasticsearch.service
In the editor, add this and save:
[Service]
Restart=always
Then reload the systemd daemon to get the updated config:
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
Finally, cat the elasticsearch service config to check that it has picked up
the new restart behaviour:
sudo systemctl cat elasticsearch.service
You should see the additional config at the end:
# /etc/systemd/system/elasticsearch.service.d/override.conf
[Service]
Restart=always