Snow Owl Docs
8.x
8.x
  • README
  • Getting started
    • Basic Concepts
    • Installation
    • Explore Snow Owl
      • Check Health
      • List available Code Systems
      • SNOMED CT
      • Import RF2 distribution
      • Search SNOMED CT
      • Create a Concept
      • Version SNOMED CT
      • Export SNOMED CT
    • Conclusion
  • Set up Snow Owl
    • Installing Snow Owl
      • Installing Snow Owl with .zip or .tar.gz
      • Installing Snow Owl with RPM
      • Installing Snow Owl with Debian Package
      • Installing Snow Owl with Docker
    • Configuring Snow Owl
      • Setting JVM options
      • Logging configuration
      • Elasticsearch configuration
    • Important Snow Owl configuration
    • Important System configuration
      • Disable swapping
      • File descriptors
      • Virtual memory
      • Number of threads
      • Tweaking for performance
    • Starting Snow Owl
    • Stopping Snow Owl
    • Configuring security
      • Configuring a file realm
      • Configuring an LDAP realm
    • Configuring monitoring
    • Configuration reference
  • Extension Management
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    • CIS API
    • FHIR API
      • CodeSystem
      • ValueSet
      • ConceptMap
  • Backup and Restore
    • Curator
  • Migrate from 7.x
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  • Configure the embedded instance
  • Connect to a remote cluster
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  1. Set up Snow Owl
  2. Configuring Snow Owl

Elasticsearch configuration

Last updated 3 years ago

By default, Snow Owl is starting and connecting to an embedded Elasticsearch cluster available on http://localhost:9200. This cluster has only a single node and its discovery method is set to single-node, which means it is not able to connect to other Elasticsearch clusters and will be used exclusively by Snow Owl.

This single node Elasticsearch cluster can easily serve Snow Owl in testing, evaluation and small authoring environments, but it is recommended to customize how Snow Owl connects to an Elasticsearch cluster in larger environments (especially when planning to scale with user demand).

You have two options to configure Elasticsearch used by Snow Owl.

Configure the embedded instance

The first option is to configure the underlying Elasticsearch instance by editing the configuration file elasticsearch.yml, which depending on your installation is available in the configuration directory (you can create the file, if it is not available, Snow Owl will pick it up during the next startup).

The embedded Elasticsearch version is 6.3.2. If you are configuring it to connect to an existing Elasticsearch cluster, then make sure that the cluster version matches with this version.

Connect to a remote cluster

The second option is to configure Snow Owl to use a remote Elasticsearch cluster without the embedded instance. In order to use this feature you need to set the repository.index.clusterUrl configuration parameter to the remote address of your Elasticsearch cluster. When Snow Owl is configured to connect to a remote Elasticsearch cluster, it won't boot up the embedded instance, which reduces the memory requirements of Snow Owl slightly.

You can connect to self-hosted clusters or hosted solutions provided by and for example.

AWS
Elastic.co