You need a working Elasticsearch installation as we described in the Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe and a simple text editor to change configuration files.

The steps required for setting up a simple node are as follows:

        path.conf: /opt/data/es/conf
        path.data: /opt/data/es/data1,/opt2/data/data2
        path.work: /opt/data/work 
        path.logs: /opt/data/logs 
        path.plugins: /opt/data/plugins 

        path.conf: c:Elasticsearchconf 
        path.data: c:Elasticsearchdata 
        path.work: c:Elasticsearchwork 
        path.logs: c:Elasticsearchlogs 
        path.plugins: c:Elasticsearchplugins 

        index.number_of_shards: 5 
        index.number_of_replicas: 1 

The path.conf defines the directory that contains your configuration: mainly elasticsearch.yml and logging.yml. This is default $ES_HOME/config with ES_HOME to install directory.

The path.data is the most important one: it allows us to define one or more directories (in different disk) where you can store your index data. When you define more than one directory, they are managed a la RAID 0 (their space is sum up), favoring locations with most free space.

The path.work is a location when Elasticsearch stores temporary files.

The path.log is where log files are put. The control how to log is managed in logging.yml.

The path.plugins allows you to override the plugins path (the default is $ES_HOME/plugins). It's useful to put system-wide plugins.

The main parameters used to control index and shards in index.number_of_shards that controls the standard number of shards for a new created index and index.number_of_replicas that controls the initial number of replicas.

There are a lot of other parameters that can be used to customize your Elasticsearch installation and new ones are added with new releases. The most important ones are described in this and the next recipe.