Upgrading to Elasticsearch 5.4.0 on Heroku using Elastic Cloud: [indices:admin/delete] requires authentication.

I learned the hard way how to setup access authentication for a protected cluster after upgrading to Elasticsearch 5.4.0 on Heroku’s Elastic Cloud service. My previous instance did not require Shield access authentication.

After porting the changes and pushing the upgrade, I hit the following error when rebuilding indices:

Elasticsearch::Transport::Transport::Errors::Unauthorized: [401] {“error”:{“root_cause”:[{“type”:”security_exception”,”reason”:”action [indices:admin/delete] requires authentication”,”header”:{“WWW-Authenticate”:”Basic realm=\”security\” charset=\”UTF-8\””}}],”type”:”security_exception”,”reason”:”action [indices:admin/delete] requires authentication”,”header”:{“WWW-Authenticate”:”Basic realm=\”security\” charset=\”UTF-8\””}},”status”:401}

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To setup access authentication using a transport service:

(1) Install and configure the elasticsearch-transport gem (or alternative for non-Rails projects)

gem 'elasticsearch-transport', '~> 5.0.4'

(2) Push changes to Heroku server

$ git push heroku <app-name> <branch-name>

(3) Update your version on Elastic Cloud. This is accessible from the Heroku Dashboard add-on section.

Version: 5.4.0

Note: Shield is enabled by default. Save the auto-generated password that is provided for the elastic user.

(4) Using elastic credentials, log into Kibana and create an additional superuser. This is accessible from the Elastic Cloud dashboard, click on Kibana and then the management tab and elasticsearch security.

# Elasticsearch security via Kibana management tab
user: <user>
pass: <password>
role: superuser

(5) Set the access credentials on the config variable FOUNDELASTICSEARCH_URL like:

https://username:password@cluster_id.region.aws.found.io

This is accessible from your Heroku dashboard settings tab.

(6) Run rake commands to rebuild indices on Heroku environment.

$ heroku run rake elasticsearch:import:all

You should be setup and able to rebuild indices.