Description

escurl is a Bash script acting as a command line wrapper around curl to interact with the REST APIs of Elasticsearch and Kibana. All curl options are supported but calling multiple APIs on the same command line is not supported.

Configuration

Profiles

Profiles are plaintext files stored in the home directory of escurl (~/.escurl by default). Each profile contains the parameters to connect to Elasticsearch and/or Kibana. By default escurl reads a configuration file named default.

Environment variables

The location of the home directory can be changed via the ES_CURL_HOME environment variable and the configuration file can be changed via ES_CURL_PROFILE. The profile can also be overwritten with the --profile <name> command line option.

Profile content

Profiles contain settings in the form of setting=value. Recognized settings are:

• elasticsearch: No default value
• kibana: No default value
• user: No default value
• password: No default value
• options: No default value

All the settings are optional. Here's an example of a configuration file:

elasticsearch=https://localhost:9200
kibana=https://localhost:5601
user=elastic
password=changeme
options="-k"

Usage

escurl [options...] [API|URL]

API, URL and options

The escurl command line options all start with - and the list of recognized options can be found below. Other parameters are either interpreted as an API, a URL, a curl parameter or a JSON / NDJSON payload.

• A command line parameter that starts with http[s]:// or contains a <hostname>:<port> is interpreted as a URL. As in curl, you can specify multiple parts of URLs by writing part sets within braces as in http://site.{one,two,three}.com. Multiple URLs are not supported though, and a URL cannot start with {.
• A command line parameter that starts with - is either a escurl parameter if it is listed below or interpreted as a curl parameter otherwise. All curl parameters are supported.
• A command line parameter that starts with { is interpreted as a JSON (or NDJSON) payload to be sent to the server. Similar to data payload in curl, if it starts with the letter @, the rest should be a filename. If the first character in the file is {, the file content is also interpreted as JSON (or NDJSON) payload.
• Otherwise, the command line parameter is interpreted as an API to be called on Elasticsearch or Kibana (if the API starts with kbn: or if --kibana was specified).

Options

--show-config

   Print the current configuration. Can be combined with --profiles to show the content of all the profiles.

-h, --help

   Usage help.

--kibana

   Use Kibana endoint instead of Elasticsearch. Same as prefixing the API with kbn:.

--ndjson

   Use NDJSON content type instead of JSON. It only is effective when a JSON payload has been detected.

--no-pretty

   Disable pretty results. By default pretty results are enabled for requests sent to Elasticsearch.

--print

   Print the curl command instead of executing it.

--profile <name>

   Overwrite the configured/default profile.

--profiles

   Print the list of profiles in escurl home directory. This can be combined with --show-config to display the content of the profiles as well (password will be printed too).

--show-password

   By default --show-config and --print options don't show the password configured in the profiles. This option prints the actual configured password.

Workflow examples

Profiles offer a convenient way to store the credentials of deployments. It can be useful to adopt a naming convention and prefix the profiles with ess_, eck_ or local_ followed by the name of the deployment.

The following command lists the profiles in the escurl home directory:

$ escurl --profiles
default
default-apikey
eck_simple
ess_apm
ess_security
ess_version_8
local_ssl

Elasticsearch

To work with a specific cluster, say ess_security, we can export ES_CURL_PROFILE:

$ export ES_CURL_PROFILE=ess_security
$ escurl --show-config
--
ES_CURL_HOME=
ES_CURL_PROFILE=ess_security
--
path=/Users/fred/.escurl/ess_security
--
elasticsearch=https://security-45dbac.es.us-central1.gcp.cloud.es.io:9243
kibana=https://security-45dbac.kb.us-central1.gcp.cloud.es.io:9243
user=fred
password=<secret>
options=

Further escurl commands are directly issued to this cluster:

$ escurl
{
  "name" : "instance-0000000005",
  "cluster_name" : "a9e5c54f660248e1a65eaffb8fce8ff6",
  "cluster_uuid" : "d3fLC3UFSZuSf0lE9dPyEQ",
  "version" : {
    "number" : "8.1.3",
    "build_flavor" : "default",
    "build_type" : "docker",
    "build_hash" : "39afaa3c0fe7db4869a161985e240bd7182d7a07",
    "build_date" : "2022-04-19T08:13:25.444693396Z",
    "build_snapshot" : false,
    "lucene_version" : "9.0.0",
    "minimum_wire_compatibility_version" : "7.17.0",
    "minimum_index_compatibility_version" : "7.0.0"
  },
  "tagline" : "You Know, for Search"
}

$ escurl _cluster/health
{
  "cluster_name" : "a9e5c54f660248e1a65eaffb8fce8ff6",
  "status" : "green",
  "timed_out" : false,
  "number_of_nodes" : 3,
  "number_of_data_nodes" : 2,
  "active_primary_shards" : 570,
  "active_shards" : 1140,
  "relocating_shards" : 0,
  "initializing_shards" : 0,
  "unassigned_shards" : 0,
  "delayed_unassigned_shards" : 0,
  "number_of_pending_tasks" : 0,
  "number_of_in_flight_fetch" : 0,
  "task_max_waiting_in_queue_millis" : 0,
  "active_shards_percent_as_number" : 100.0
}

To print the curl command instead of executing it, add --print:

$ escurl _cluster/health --print
curl -u'fred:<secret>' "https://security-45dbac.es.us-central1.gcp.cloud.es.io:9243/_cluster/health?pretty"

To illustrate how to send a JSON payload, let's create a user:

$ escurl -XPOST /_security/user/jacknich/ '{
  "password" : "l0ng-r4nd0m-p@ssw0rd",
  "roles" : [ "admin", "other_role1" ],
  "full_name" : "Jack Nicholson",
  "email" : "jacknich@example.com",
  "metadata" : {
    "intelligence" : 7
  }
}'

The generated curlcommand is:

curl -X'POST' -H'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{
  "password" : "l0ng-r4nd0m-p@ssw0rd",
  "roles" : [ "admin", "other_role1" ],
  "full_name" : "Jack Nicholson",
  "email" : "jacknich@example.com",
  "metadata" : {
    "intelligence" : 7
  }
}' -u'fred:<secret>' "https://security-45dbac.es.us-central1.gcp.cloud.es.io:9243/_security/user/jacknich?pretty"

Sending bulk requests from a file named requests will also be quite shorter than the corresponding curl command:

$ escurl -XPOST my_index/_bulk @requests --ndjson

The generated curl command is:

curl -X'POST' -H'Content-Type: application/x-ndjson' --data-binary '@requests' -u'fred:<secret>' "https://security-45dbac.es.us-central1.gcp.cloud.es.io:9243/my_index/_bulk?pretty"

Kibana

To send requests to Kibana instead of Elasticsearch we can either use the --kibana option or prefix the API with kbn::

escurl kbn:/api/index_management/indices

Executes this command:

curl -H'kbn-xsrf: true' -u'fred:l0ng-r4nd0m-p@ssw0rd' "https://security-45dbac.kb.us-central1.gcp.cloud.es.io:9243/api/index_management/indices"