Elasticsearch, Failed to obtain node lock, is the following location writable

Question

Elasticsearch won\'t start using ./bin/elasticsearch. It raises the following exception:

- ElasticsearchIllegalStateException[Failed to obtain n         


        

Answer 1

After I upgraded the elasticsearch docker-image from version 5.6.x to 6.3.y the container would not start anymore because of the aforementioned error

Failed to obtain node lock

In my case the root-cause of the error was missing file-permissions

The data-folder used by elasticsearch was mounted from the host-system into the container (declared in the docker-compose.yml):

    volumes:
      - /var/docker_folders/common/experimental-upgrade:/usr/share/elasticsearch/data

This folder could not be accessed anymore by elasticsearch for reasons I did not understand at all. After I set very permissive file-permissions to this folder and all sub-folders the container did start again.

I do not want to reproduce the command to set those very permissive access-rights on the mounted docker-folder, because it is most likely a very bad practice and a security-issue. I just wanted to share the fact that it might not be a second process of elasticsearch running, but actually just missing access-rights to the mounted folder.

Maybe someone could elaborate on the apropriate rights to set for a mounted-folder in a docker-container?