B.4. Telling Elasticsearch to require certain plugins

When deploying Elasticsearch, it can be helpful to require certain plugins to be installed. This means that Elasticsearch will refuse to start until these plugins are installed and detected. This is accomplished by using the plugin.mandatory setting. For example, to require that the elasticsearch-head and ICU analysis plugins are both installed, you’d add this line to elasticsearch.yml: plugin.mandatory: analysis-icu,head

If you then try to start Elasticsearch without these plugins installed, you’ll see that Elasticsearch at first refuses to start. But it starts once the plugins have been installed, as shown in the next listing. Listing B.6. Making plugins mandatory for the Elasticsearch service