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Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine capable of solving a growing number of use cases. As the heart of the Elastic Stack, it centrally stores your data so you can discover the expected and uncover the unexpected.

— Elasticsearch Overview

JanusGraph supports Elasticsearch as an index backend, and OpenSearch with the same index backend. Here are some of the Elasticsearch features supported by JanusGraph:

  • Full-Text: Supports all Text predicates to search for text properties that matches a given word, prefix or regular expression.
  • Geo: Supports all Geo predicates to search for geo properties that are intersecting, within, disjoint to or contained in a given query geometry. Supports points, circles, boxes, lines and polygons for indexing. Supports circles, boxes and polygons for querying point properties and all shapes for querying non-point properties.
  • Numeric Range: Supports all numeric comparisons in Compare.
  • Flexible Configuration: Supports remote operation and open-ended settings customization.
  • Collections: Supports indexing SET and LIST cardinality properties.
  • Temporal: Nanosecond granularity temporal indexing.
  • Custom Analyzer: Choose to use a custom analyzer

Please see Version Compatibility for details on what versions of Elasticsearch will work with JanusGraph.

Important

JanusGraph uses sandboxed https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/master/modules-scripting-painless.html[Painless scripts] for inline updates, which are enabled by default in Elasticsearch.

Running Elasticsearch

JanusGraph supports connections to a running Elasticsearch cluster. JanusGraph provides two options for running local Elasticsearch instances for getting started quickly. JanusGraph server (see Getting started) automatically starts a local Elasticsearch instance. Alternatively JanusGraph releases include a full Elasticsearch distribution to allow users to manually start a local Elasticsearch instance (see this page for more information).

$ elasticsearch/bin/elasticsearch

Note

For security reasons Elasticsearch must be run under a non-root account

Elasticsearch Configuration Overview

JanusGraph supports HTTP(S) client connections to a running Elasticsearch cluster. Please see Version Compatibility for details on what versions of Elasticsearch will work with the different client types in JanusGraph.

Note

JanusGraph’s index options start with the string "index.[X]." where "[X]" is a user-defined name for the backend. This user-defined name must be passed to JanusGraph’s ManagementSystem interface when building a mixed index, as described in Mixed Index, so that JanusGraph knows which of potentially multiple configured index backends to use. Configuration snippets in this chapter use the name search, whereas prose discussion of options typically write [X] in the same position. The exact index name is not significant as long as it is used consistently in JanusGraph’s configuration and when administering indices.

Tip

It’s recommended that index names contain only alphanumeric lowercase characters and hyphens, and that they start with a lowercase letter.

Connecting to Elasticsearch

The Elasticsearch client is specified as follows: 

index.search.backend=elasticsearch

When connecting to Elasticsearch a single or list of hostnames for the Elasticsearch instances must be provided. These are supplied via JanusGraph’s index.[X].hostname key. 

index.search.backend=elasticsearch
index.search.hostname=10.0.0.10:9200

Each host or host:port pair specified here will be added to the HTTP client’s round-robin list of request targets. Here’s a minimal configuration that will round-robin over 10.0.0.10 on the default Elasticsearch HTTP port (9200) and 10.0.0.20 on port 7777: 

index.search.backend=elasticsearch
index.search.hostname=10.0.0.10, 10.0.0.20:7777

JanusGraph index.[X] and index.[X].elasticsearch options

JanusGraph only uses default values for index-name and health-request-timeout. See Configuration Reference for descriptions of these options and their accepted values.

  • index.[X].index-name
  • index.[X].elasticsearch.health-request-timeout

REST Client Options

The REST client accepts the index.[X].elasticsearch.bulk-refresh option. This option controls when changes are made visible to search. See ?refresh documentation for more information.

The client of an index backend opens up to index.[X].elasticsearch.max-connections connections to all Elasticsearch hosts together, 30 by default, and up to index.[X].elasticsearch.max-connections-per-host to each host, by default the total divided evenly among the hosts, but at least 10. A request waits until a connection is free, so these cap how many queries and bulk requests the index backend has in flight at once. A single host, such as a load balancer or the endpoint of a hosted cluster, takes all 30 connections by default, while three hosts take 10 each, so that a host which stops answering can't hold every connection. A JanusGraph Server which runs more Gremlin threads than that may need higher values. Before JanusGraph 1.2.0 the client allowed 10 connections per host, whatever the number of hosts.

The client sends and receives with as many I/O threads as the JVM has processors, unless index.[X].elasticsearch.io-threads sets another number. They don't wait for Elasticsearch, so a few are enough, which matters for a JanusGraph Server with many graphs, as every index backend of every graph has a client of its own.

index.[X].elasticsearch.compression=true compresses the bodies of requests with gzip, bulk requests above all, and accepts compressed responses, which saves network traffic at the cost of CPU on both sides. The client compresses a request on one of its I/O threads, whose other requests wait meanwhile, so a large bulk request can delay queries. More I/O threads make it less likely that a query shares that thread, and a smaller index.[X].elasticsearch.bulk-chunk-size-limit-bytes shortens the wait. A compressed request is sent in chunks without a Content-Length header, which some request signers, such as interceptors which sign requests with AWS Signature Version 4, may not handle.

A load balancer, NAT gateway or firewall between JanusGraph and Elasticsearch may drop a connection which stays idle longer than its idle timeout, and the next request on that connection then fails. Set index.[X].elasticsearch.client-keep-alive below that timeout, so that the client stops reusing a connection before the network drops it.

REST Client HTTPS Configuration

SSL support for HTTP can be enabled by setting the index.[X].elasticsearch.ssl.enabled configuration option to true. Note that depending on your configuration you may need to change the value of index.[X].port if your HTTPS port number is different from the default one for the REST API (9200).

When SSL is enabled you may also configure the location and password of the truststore. This can be done as follows:

index.search.elasticsearch.ssl.truststore.location=/path/to/your/truststore.jks
index.search.elasticsearch.ssl.truststore.password=truststorepwd

Note that these settings apply only to Elasticsearch REST client and do not affect any other SSL connections in JanusGraph.

Configuration of the client keystore is also supported:

index.search.elasticsearch.ssl.keystore.location=/path/to/your/keystore.jks
index.search.elasticsearch.ssl.keystore.storepassword=keystorepwd
index.search.elasticsearch.ssl.keystore.keypassword=keypwd

Any of the passwords can be empty.

If needed, the SSL hostname verification can be disabled by setting the index.[X].elasticsearch.ssl.disable-hostname-verification property value to true and the support for self-signed SSL certificates can be enabled by setting index.[X].elasticsearch.ssl.allow-self-signed-certificates property value to true.

Tip

It is not recommended to rely on the self-signed SSL certificates or to disable the hostname verification for a production system as it significantly limits the client's ability to provide the secure communication channel with the Elasticsearch server(s). This may result in leaking the confidential data which may be a part of your JanusGraph index.

REST Client HTTP Authentication

REST client supports the following authentication options: Basic HTTP Authentication (username/password) and custom authentication based on the user-provided implementation.

These authentication methods are independent from SSL client authentication described above.

REST Client Basic HTTP Authentication

Basic HTTP Authentication is available regardless of the state of SSL support. Optionally, an authentication realm can be specified via index.[X].elasticsearch.http.auth.basic.realm property.

index.search.elasticsearch.http.auth.type=basic
index.search.elasticsearch.http.auth.basic.username=httpuser
index.search.elasticsearch.http.auth.basic.password=httppassword

Tip

It is highly recommended to use SSL (e.g. setting index.[X].elasticsearch.ssl.enabled to true) when using this option as the credentials can be intercepted when sent over an unencrypted connection!

REST Client Custom HTTP Authentication

Additional authentication methods can be implemented by providing your own implementation. The custom authenticator is configured as follows:

index.search.elasticsearch.http.auth.type=custom
index.search.elasticsearch.http.auth.custom.authenticator-class=fully.qualified.class.Name
index.search.elasticsearch.http.auth.custom.authenticator-args=arg1,arg2,...

Argument list is optional and can be empty.

The class specified there has to implement the org.janusgraph.diskstorage.es.rest.util.RestClientAuthenticator interface or extend org.janusgraph.diskstorage.es.rest.util.RestClientAuthenticatorBase convenience class. The implementation gets access to HTTP client configuration and can customize the client as needed. Refer to <> for more information.

For example, the following code snippet implements an authenticator allowing the Elasticsearch REST client to authenticate and get authorized against AWS IAM:

import java.io.IOException;
import java.time.LocalDateTime;
import java.time.ZoneOffset;
import org.apache.http.HttpRequestInterceptor;
import org.apache.http.impl.nio.client.HttpAsyncClientBuilder;
import org.janusgraph.diskstorage.es.rest.util.RestClientAuthenticatorBase;
import com.amazonaws.auth.DefaultAWSCredentialsProviderChain;
import com.amazonaws.regions.DefaultAwsRegionProviderChain;
import com.google.common.base.Supplier;
import vc.inreach.aws.request.AWSSigner;
import vc.inreach.aws.request.AWSSigningRequestInterceptor;
/**
 * <p>
 * Elasticsearch REST HTTP(S) client callback implementing AWS request signing.
 * </p>
 * <p>
 * The signer is based on AWS SDK default provider chain, allowing multiple options for providing
 * the caller credentials. See {@link DefaultAWSCredentialsProviderChain} documentation for the details.
 * </p>
 */
public class AWSV4AuthHttpClientConfigCallback extends RestClientAuthenticatorBase {
    private static final String AWS_SERVICE_NAME = "es";
    private HttpRequestInterceptor awsSigningInterceptor;
    public AWSV4AuthHttpClientConfigCallback(final String[] args) {
        // does not require any configuration
    }
    @Override
    public void init() throws IOException {
        DefaultAWSCredentialsProviderChain awsCredentialsProvider = new DefaultAWSCredentialsProviderChain();
        final Supplier<LocalDateTime> clock = () -> LocalDateTime.now(ZoneOffset.UTC);
        // using default region provider chain
        // (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-java/v2/developer-guide/java-dg-region-selection.html)
        DefaultAwsRegionProviderChain regionProviderChain = new DefaultAwsRegionProviderChain();
        final String awsRegion = regionProviderChain.getRegion();
        final AWSSigner awsSigner = new AWSSigner(awsCredentialsProvider, awsRegion, AWS_SERVICE_NAME, clock);
        this.awsSigningInterceptor = new AWSSigningRequestInterceptor(awsSigner);
    }
    @Override
    public HttpAsyncClientBuilder customizeHttpClient(HttpAsyncClientBuilder httpClientBuilder) {
        return httpClientBuilder.addInterceptorLast(awsSigningInterceptor);/
    }
}

This custom authenticator does not use any constructor arguments.

Ingest Pipelines

Different ingest pipelines can be set for each mixed index. Ingest pipeline can be use to pre-process documents before indexing. A pipeline is composed by a series of processors. Each processor transforms the document in some way. For example date processor can extract a date from a text to a date field. So you can query this date with JanusGraph without it being physically in the primary storage.

  • index.[X].elasticsearch.ingest-pipeline.[mixedIndexName] = pipeline_id

See ingest documentation for more information about ingest pipelines and processors documentation for more information about ingest processors.

Secure Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch does not perform authentication or authorization. A client that can connect to Elasticsearch is trusted by Elasticsearch. When Elasticsearch runs on an unsecured or public network, particularly the Internet, it should be deployed with some type of external security. This is generally done with a combination of firewalling, tunneling of Elasticsearch’s ports or by using Elasticsearch extensions such as X-Pack. Elasticsearch has two client-facing ports to consider:

  • The HTTP REST API, usually on port 9200
  • The native "transport" protocol, usually on port 9300

A client uses either one protocol/port or the other, but not both simultaneously. Securing the HTTP protocol port is generally done with a combination of firewalling and a reverse proxy with SSL encryption and HTTP authentication. There are a couple of ways to approach security on the native "transport" protocol port:

In addition to that, some hosted Elasticsearch services offer other methods of authentication and authorization. For example, AWS Elasticsearch Service requires the use of HTTPS and offers an option for using IAM-based access control. For that the requests sent to this service must be signed. This can be achieved by using a custom authenticator (see above).

Tunnel Elasticsearch's native "transport" protocol:: This approach can be implemented with SSL/TLS tunneling (for instance via stunnel), a VPN, or SSH port forwarding. SSL/TLS tunnels require non-trivial setup and monitoring: one or both ends of the tunnel need a certificate, and the stunnel processes need to be configured and running continuously. The setup for most secure VPNs is likewise non-trivial. Some Elasticsearch service providers handle server-side tunnel management and provide a custom Elasticsearch transport.type to simplify the client setup.

Add a firewall rule that allows only trusted clients to connect on Elasticsearch’s native protocol port
This is typically done at the host firewall level. Easy to configure, but very weak security by itself.

OpenSearch

JanusGraph supports OpenSearch 2 and 3 with the elasticsearch index backend. OpenSearch was forked from Elasticsearch 7.10 and provides the Elasticsearch 7 API, which JanusGraph uses when the cluster reports an OpenSearch version:

index.search.backend=elasticsearch
index.search.hostname=localhost

JanusGraph rejects other OpenSearch versions like unsupported Elasticsearch versions, unless index.[X].elasticsearch.major-version is set (see below). That includes OpenSearch 1, which reached its end of life in May 2025.

When JanusGraph detects OpenSearch, it ignores index.[X].elasticsearch.use-mapping-for-es7, because OpenSearch 2 removed mapping types.

OpenSearch doesn't need compatibility.override_main_response_version for JanusGraph, and OpenSearch 3 removed that setting. With it, OpenSearch 2 reports the version 7.10.2, so JanusGraph takes it for Elasticsearch 7.

index.[X].elasticsearch.major-version sets the major version of the Elasticsearch API which the cluster provides, so that JanusGraph doesn't ask the cluster for its version, for example if the JanusGraph user may not read the root endpoint of the cluster. For OpenSearch, set it to 7.

In both of these cases JanusGraph doesn't know that the cluster is OpenSearch, so keep index.[X].elasticsearch.use-mapping-for-es7 disabled.

The security plugin of OpenSearch is configured like a secured Elasticsearch cluster, with the HTTPS and HTTP authentication options:

index.search.elasticsearch.ssl.enabled=true
index.search.elasticsearch.http.auth.type=basic
index.search.elasticsearch.http.auth.basic.username=admin
index.search.elasticsearch.http.auth.basic.password=<password>

JanusGraph raises the cluster setting search.max_open_scroll_context when it opens the index. If the JanusGraph user may not update cluster settings (cluster:admin/settings/update), set index.[X].elasticsearch.setup-max-open-scroll-contexts to false. Only a result larger than a page holds a scroll context, and it is released as soon as the result has been read or its traversal is closed (see Search Requests), so the default limit of 500 open contexts per node is rarely reached.

Amazon OpenSearch Service domains which use IAM based access control need signed requests, which a custom authenticator can provide. These domains don't allow changing search.max_open_scroll_context, so set index.[X].elasticsearch.setup-max-open-scroll-contexts to false for them. Amazon OpenSearch Serverless isn't supported: it provides neither the scroll API nor the stored scripts which JanusGraph uses.

Index Creation Options

JanusGraph supports customization of the index settings it uses when creating its Elasticsearch index. It allows setting arbitrary key-value pairs on the settings object in the Elasticsearch create index request issued by JanusGraph. Here is a non-exhaustive sample of Elasticsearch index settings that can be customized using this mechanism:

  • index.number_of_replicas
  • index.number_of_shards
  • index.refresh_interval

Settings customized through this mechanism are only applied when JanusGraph attempts to create its index in Elasticsearch. If JanusGraph finds that its index already exists, then it does not attempt to recreate it, and these settings have no effect.

Embedding Elasticsearch index creation settings with create.ext

JanusGraph iterates over all properties prefixed with index.[X].elasticsearch.create.ext., where [X] is an index name such as search. It strips the prefix from each property key. The remainder of the stripped key will be interpreted as an Elasticsearch index creation setting. The value associated with the key is not modified. The stripped key and unmodified value are passed as part of the settings object in the Elasticsearch create index request that JanusGraph issues when bootstrapping on Elasticsearch. This allows embedding arbitrary index creation settings settings in JanusGraph’s properties. Here’s an example configuration fragment that customizes three Elasticsearch index settings using the create.ext config mechanism:

index.search.backend=elasticsearch
index.search.elasticsearch.create.ext.number_of_shards=15
index.search.elasticsearch.create.ext.number_of_replicas=3
index.search.elasticsearch.create.ext.shard.check_on_startup=true

The configuration fragment listed above takes advantage of Elasticsearch’s assumption, implemented server-side, that unqualified create index setting keys have an index. prefix. It’s also possible to spell out the index prefix explicitly. Here’s a JanusGraph config file functionally equivalent to the one listed above, except that the index. prefix before the index creation settings is explicit: 

index.search.backend=elasticsearch
index.search.elasticsearch.create.ext.index.number_of_shards=15
index.search.elasticsearch.create.ext.index.number_of_replicas=3
index.search.elasticsearch.create.ext.index.shard.check_on_startup=false

Tip

The create.ext mechanism for specifying index creation settings is compatible with JanusGraph’s Elasticsearch configuration.

Troubleshooting

Connection Issues to remote Elasticsearch cluster

Check that the Elasticsearch cluster nodes are reachable on the HTTP protocol port from the JanusGraph nodes. Check the node listen port by examining the Elasticsearch node configuration logs or using a general diagnostic utility like netstat. Check the JanusGraph configuration.

Optimizing Elasticsearch

Search Requests

JanusGraph fetches the result of a mixed index query with as few requests as it can tell the result needs:

  • A query whose offset and limit together are at most 10,000, Elasticsearch's default index.max_result_window, is one search request of exactly that size. Elasticsearch applies the offset of a direct index query in that request.
  • A query without a limit, or beyond that size, first asks for one hit more than a page after the offset, or for what is left up to the 10,000th hit if that is less. The page size is index.[X].max-result-set-size (50 by default). When fewer hits come back than were asked for, that is the whole result. Only a larger result is read through the scroll API, from its first hit on and in pages of that size, which costs such a result one request more than the pages alone. An offset of 10,000 or more leaves nothing to ask for first, and such a query is read through a scroll at once, however small its result.

A scroll context is released as soon as the result has been read to its end, the limit is reached, or the traversal is closed, which JanusGraph Server does after every request. Embedded code which abandons a traversal before its end should close it, for example with try-with-resources; otherwise the context expires after index.[X].elasticsearch.scroll-keep-alive seconds (60 by default), as it did before JanusGraph 1.2.0. A release which the cluster rejects, for example for want of the privilege to clear scrolls, is logged as a warning once. Neither the single request nor the first request of an unlimited query counts the total number of hits; the pages of a scroll do, because Elasticsearch requires it. On an index which JanusGraph did not create, index.max_result_window must allow 10,000 hits, which is its default; JanusGraph lifts it on the indexes it creates.

If large results are common, a larger index.[X].max-result-set-size trades the size of one response for the number of requests: a result of 5,000 hits is about 100 scroll pages of 50, and one request when it is limited to 5,000.

Write Optimization

For bulk loading or other write-intense applications, consider increasing Elasticsearch’s refresh interval. Refer to this discussion on how to increase the refresh interval and its impact on write performance. Note, that a higher refresh interval means that it takes a longer time for graph mutations to be available in the index.

Reindex Optimization

Mixed-index reindex jobs can batch more documents per backend restore call than the regular storage scan page size. This allows Elasticsearch to use larger bulk requests during SchemaAction.REINDEX without changing storage.page-size for other graph operations.

schema.reindex.mixed-index-batch-enabled = true
schema.reindex.mixed-index-batch-size = 1000

Increase schema.reindex.mixed-index-batch-size when Elasticsearch can handle larger bulk requests and JanusGraph workers have enough memory for the queued documents. Set schema.reindex.mixed-index-batch-enabled to false to keep the previous storage-page-sized reindex batches.

Tuning the reindex throughput

The reindex job accumulates restored documents in memory and flushes them to Elasticsearch in a single bulk (_bulk) request per worker once the batch size is reached, so three settings determine reindex throughput:

  • Batch size (schema.reindex.mixed-index-batch-size). A larger batch sends fewer, larger bulk requests, which reduces the number of HTTP round-trips, transaction commits and management-system reads per reindexed element. The gains are largest going from the storage page size (the pre-batching default, e.g. 100) up to roughly one or a few thousand documents, and then taper off. Remember that a worker buffers up to mixed-index-batch-size documents in memory, and a reindex runs several workers in parallel, so peak heap usage grows with mixed-index-batch-size × reindex-threads × average-document-size — keep the default modest and raise it only when documents are small and workers have headroom.
  • Reindex threads. updateIndex(index, SchemaAction.REINDEX) uses Runtime.getRuntime().availableProcessors() worker threads by default; pass an explicit count with updateIndex(index, SchemaAction.REINDEX, threads). More threads issue more concurrent bulk requests and scale best when the Elasticsearch index has multiple shards spread across data nodes.
  • Bulk refresh (index.[X].elasticsearch.bulk-refresh). With the default value false a reindex is throughput-bound. If it is set to wait_for (or true) every bulk request blocks until the next index refresh, which can dominate the total reindex time; in that mode batching helps the most, because it proportionally reduces the number of refresh waits. For the fastest reindex keep bulk-refresh = false and rely on the index becoming searchable at the next periodic refresh once the job completes.

When the storage scan, not Elasticsearch, is the ceiling

On the CQL backend the reindex pipeline is often storage-scan-bound, not Elasticsearch-bound: the scan job streams the whole table through a small, fixed number of scan queries (one per slice query — three for a vertex mixed index), and the reindex worker threads spend most of their time waiting for rows. The telltale signs are low Elasticsearch CPU, only a handful of reindex workers reporting activity regardless of the configured thread count, and the scan progress log (StandardScannerExecutor) showing a near-empty row queue.

Three CQL options remove that ceiling:

# Scan each Murmur3 token range on its own pipeline (true parallel scan).
storage.cql.parallel-scan-token-ranges = 8

# Bigger pages for full scans only (OLTP reads keep storage.page-size).
storage.cql.scan-page-size = 2000

# Stop scan queries server-side at each row's per-key limit (default true).
storage.cql.scan-per-partition-limit-enabled = true
  • parallel-scan-token-ranges splits the scan into disjoint token ranges, each drained by its own data-puller threads and merged independently — producer throughput scales roughly linearly until the Cassandra cluster saturates. Start with a small multiple of the cluster's node count and watch node load.
  • scan-page-size decouples the scan fetch size from the OLTP-oriented storage.page-size; a few thousand rows per page is usually a safe and substantial improvement. Pages are additionally prefetched one ahead, so the network wait overlaps row processing.
  • scan-per-partition-limit-enabled pushes each scan query's per-key limit into the query as PER PARTITION LIMIT. The scan's key-existence (grounding) query has a per-key limit of 1, so on graphs with wide rows (many edges or properties per vertex) this stops the grounding query from streaming the entire table to the client just to prove each key exists. On a CQL-compatible service without PER PARTITION LIMIT support the pushdown auto-disables with a warning at store open.

The scan-side and Elasticsearch-side settings compose: once the storage scan is parallel, raise the reindex thread count and, if Elasticsearch becomes the new bottleneck, scale its side (shards, replicas during rebuild, refresh interval) as described above.

Further Reading

  • Please refer to the Elasticsearch homepage and available documentation for more information on Elasticsearch and how to setup an Elasticsearch cluster.