Troubleshooting Elasticsearch Auth Issue

I could not find a simple way to troubleshoot this elasticsearch auth error “unable to authenticate user” - it’s amazing how this seems to be hard to find on the interwebs. So here is the secret.

Solving unable to authenticate user error in elastic

First, to get this error, you can simply do this curl command:

curl --user usename:pass -X GET "localhost:9200/_stats?pretty"

Example of the auth error you will get if your password is wrong:

{
  "error" : {
    "root_cause" : [
      {
        "type" : "security_exception",
        "reason" : "unable to authenticate user [elastic] for REST request [/_stats?pretty]",
        "header" : {
          "WWW-Authenticate" : "Basic realm=\"security\" charset=\"UTF-8\""
        }
      }
    ],
    "type" : "security_exception",
    "reason" : "unable to authenticate user [elastic] for REST request [/_stats?pretty]",
    "header" : {
      "WWW-Authenticate" : "Basic realm=\"security\" charset=\"UTF-8\""
    }
  },
  "status" : 401
}

Reset your Elasticsearch Password for all accounts

You can easily set the password back to what you think it is by running this command.

/usr/share/elasticsearch/bin/elasticsearch-setup-passwords interactive

I don’t know why this elasticsearch bin is in /usr/share… that’s not where I would have expected it to be, but you know - always learning new things and sharing.

Hope this was helpful to someone else!