Connecting an external application

Connecting with a language's driver

All the information a driver needs to make a connection to your deployment is in the "https" section of a credential created on the Service credentials page. The table contains a breakdown for reference.

• 0... indicates that there might be one or more of these entries in an array.

Many Elasticsearch drivers are able to make a connection to your deployment when given the URI-formatted connection string found in the "composed" field of the connection information. See the following example:

https://admin:$PASSWORD@d5eeee66-5bc4-498a-b73b-1307848f1eac.8f7bfd8f3faa4218aec56e069eb46187.databases.appdomain.cloud:31821

The following example uses Java to connect.

import io.searchbox.client.JestClientFactory;
import io.searchbox.client.JestResult;
import io.searchbox.client.config.HttpClientConfig;
import io.searchbox.client.JestClient;
import io.searchbox.cluster.Health;
import org.apache.http.conn.ssl.SSLConnectionSocketFactory;
import org.apache.http.ssl.SSLContextBuilder;

import javax.net.ssl.SSLContext;
import java.io.File;
import java.security.*;
import java.security.cert.CertificateException;


import java.io.IOException;


public class ESConnect {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        // Add CA cert to truststore using something like:
        //  keytool -import -alias mycert -file /path/to/cert -keystore ./mycert -storetype pkcs12 -storepass mysecret
        // and use the path of the keystore below
        File truststore = new File("/Users/code/java-example/icdcerts");

        try {
            // use your secret and add the variable containing the truststore that you created above with the secret as a CharArray
            SSLContext sslContext = new SSLContextBuilder().loadTrustMaterial(truststore, "mysecret".toCharArray()).build();

            SSLConnectionSocketFactory sslSocketFactory = new SSLConnectionSocketFactory(sslContext);

            // set up a Jest factory
            JestClientFactory factory = new JestClientFactory();

            //configure and build Jest HTTP client with IBM Cloud Databases for Elasticsearch connection strings
            factory.setHttpClientConfig(
                    // add the Elasticsearch host and port
                    new HttpClientConfig.Builder("https://60d1b41b-2478-4767-9fc0-d99b1d00b6d1.bkvfu0nd0m8k95k94ujg.databases.appdomain.cloud:31347")
                            .multiThreaded(true)
                            // Add the credentials username and password
                            .defaultCredentials("admin", "mypassword")
                            .sslSocketFactory(sslSocketFactory)
                            .build());

            // create a JestClient
            JestClient client = factory.getObject();
            // create the call for the cluster health
            Health health = new Health.Builder().build();
            // get the cluster health as a JestResult
            JestResult result = client.execute(health);
            // print out the cluster's health
            System.out.printf("\n\n<------ CLUSTER HEALTH ------>\n%s\n\n", result.getJsonObject());
            // shutdown the connection
            client.close();

        } catch (IOException | KeyStoreException | NoSuchAlgorithmException | KeyManagementException | CertificateException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

    }

}

The following example uses the Python library elasticsearch-py to connect.

from elasticsearch import Elasticsearch
from ssl import create_default_context


context = create_default_context(cafile="path/to/cert.pem")

es = Elasticsearch(
    ['60d1b41b-2478-4767-9fc0-d99b1d00b6d1.bkvfu0nd0m8k95k94ujg.databases.appdomain.cloud'],
    http_auth=('admin', 'password'),
    port='31347',
    ssl_context=context
)

health = es.cluster.health()
print(health)

Driver TLS and self-signed certificate support

All connections to Databases for Elasticsearch are TLS 1.2 enabled, so the driver you use to connect needs to be able to support encryption. Your deployment also comes with a self-signed certificate so the driver can verify the server upon connection.

For more information, see Cloud Databases Certificates FAQ.

Other drivers

Elasticsearch has a vast array of language drivers. The table covers a few of the most common.