# start-local

A shell script that spins up Elasticsearch and Kibana locally in Docker or Podman containers for trying them out, not for production use.

start-local is a shell script that downloads and runs Elasticsearch and Kibana on a local machine using Docker or Podman, for testing and evaluation rather than production. Running it creates a folder containing a Docker/Podman Compose file, an .env file with settings including the generated Elasticsearch password, start and stop scripts, and an uninstall script.

The setup comes with a one-month trial license unlocking every Elastic feature, including the Playground, ELSER, semantic retrieval, and the Elastic Inference API; after the trial period it reverts to the free Basic tier, which still includes vector search and ES|QL. A version flag lets you pin a specific Elasticsearch and Kibana version, including beta releases, instead of the default latest stable version.

It requires about 5 GB of free disk space and runs on Linux and macOS directly, or on Windows through WSL.

Website: https://github.com/elastic/start-local