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Elastic Search Local Setup

This guide explains how to run Elastic Search locally using Docker/Podman for development purposes.

Prerequisites​

Quick Start​

Follow the official Elastic Search local development quickstart:

Elastic Search Local Development Installation Quickstart

Known Issues​

Certificate Issues (Netskope)​

If you encounter TLS/SSL certificate errors when pulling images or connecting to Elastic Search, this is likely caused by Netskope SSL inspection intercepting traffic on the corporate network.

Symptoms​

  • x509: certificate signed by unknown authority when pulling Docker images
  • SSL handshake failures from containers
  • CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED errors

The Netskope certificate must be added to Docker's trusted certificates. The approach varies by OS.

Extension-side telemetry connection​

The error above is about Docker/the OS toolchain. The extension's own telemetry connection to the Elastic Search proxy handles this automatically: the transport loads the operating system trust store (where the Netskope/corporate CA already lives) and merges it with Node's default roots, so the re-signed certificate validates with no per-user configuration.

The Elastic Search transport is loaded lazily during activation, and the @elastic/elasticsearch client is bundled into the extension so packaged VSIX builds do not depend on a separate node_modules tree at runtime.

This requires a runtime with tls.getCACertificates (Node ≥ 22.15). On older hosts the transport falls back to Node's bundled roots only — set NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS to point at the corporate CA file if the connection then fails.

Variable Interpolation in .env​

The elastic-start-local tool may generate .env values that reference other variables, e.g.:

ES_LOCAL_PORT=9200
ES_LOCAL_URL=http://localhost:${ES_LOCAL_PORT}

VS Code's envFile loader (used in launch.json) does not resolve ${VAR} references — it passes the literal string http://localhost:${ES_LOCAL_PORT} to the extension. If you see connection errors pointing to a URL containing ${...}, replace the variable reference with the actual value in elastic-start-local/.env:

ES_LOCAL_URL=http://localhost:9200