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Connecting with cURL

Connecting with cURL

You can access your Elasticsearch database directly from a command-line terminal through cURL. Elasticsearch has a wide variety of REST APIs that allow for cluster monitoring, index management and searching within the database.

Connection strings are displayed in the Endpoints panel of your deployment's Overview page, and can also be retrieved from the cloud databases CLI plug-in, and the API.

CLI Endpoints panel
Endpoints section, CLI tab

The information that you need to make a connection with cURL to your deployment is also in the "CLI" section of a credential created on the Service credentials page. The table contains a breakdown for reference.

curl connection information
Field Name Index Description
Bin The recommended binary to create a connection; in this case it is curl.
Composed A formatted command to establish a connection to your deployment. The command combines the Bin executable, Environment variable settings, and uses Arguments as command-line parameters.
Environment A list of key/values you set as environment variables.
Arguments 0... The information that is passed as arguments to the command shown in the Bin field.
Certificate Base64 A self-signed certificate that is used to confirm that an application is connecting to the appropriate server. It is base64 encoded.
Certificate Name The allocated name for the self-signed certificate.
Type The type of package that uses this connection information; in this case cli.
  • 0... indicates that there might be one or more of these entries in an array.

Elasticsearch API cURL example

CURL_CA_BUNDLE="/path-to/your_cert_file" curl -u admin:<password> 'https://d5eeee66-5bc4-499a-b73b-1307848f1eac.8f7bfd8f3faa4218aec56e069eb46187.databases.appdomain.cloud:31821/_cluster/health?pretty'
  • CURL_CA_BUNDLE - curl performs SSL certificate verification by default. Since your deployment uses a self-signed certificate, you must specify what certificate to use.
  • curl - The command itself.
  • -u - The parameter for the username and password, separated by a colon, to be used as credentials to log in to the Elasticsearch deployment.
  • https://... - The parameter that specifies the endpoints where the curl command connects. It's composed of HTTPS protocol URLs and includes a port number.
  • /_cluster/health?pretty - An Elasticsearch Cluster API endpoint that returns the status of your cluster.

Using the self-signed certificate

  1. Copy the certificate information from the Endpoints panel or the Base64 field of the service credential connection information.
  2. If needed, decode the Base64 string into text.
  3. Save the certificate to a file. (You can use the Name that is provided or your own file name).
  4. Provide the path to the CURL_CA_BUNDLE variable.

CLI plug-in support for the self-signed certificate

You can display the decoded certificate for your deployment with the CLI plug-in with the command ibmcloud cdb deployment-cacert "your-service-name". It decodes the base64 into text. Copy and save the command's output to a file and provide the file's path to the CURL_CA_BUNDLE variable.