Just like the other components of the Elastic Stack, downloading and installing Logstash is pretty simple and straightforward. Navigate to https://www.elastic.co/downloads/logstash-oss and, depending on your operating system, download the required ZIP/TAR file, as shown in the following screenshot:
Post 6.3 Elastic components come with two variations (distributions):
- OSS distribution, which is 100% Apache 2.0
- Community License, which will have basic x-pack features that are free to use and are bundled with Elastic components
More details about this can be found at https://www.elastic.co/products/x-pack/open. For this book, we will be using the logstash-oss version, which is based on the 100% Apache 2.0 license.
The Community License Logstash download page is available at https://www.elastic.co/downloads/logstash#ga-release.
The Apache 2.0 Logstash download page is available at https://www.elastic.co/downloads/logstash-oss#ga-release.
The Elastic developer community is quite vibrant, and newer releases with new features/fixes get released quite often. By the time you are reading this book, the latest Logstash version might have changed. Instructions in this book are based on Logstash version (logstash-oss) 7.0.0. You can click on the past releases link and download version 7.0.0 if you want to follow this as is. The instructions/explanations in this book should hold good for any 7.x or 6.7.x release.
Unlike Kibana, which requires major and minor version compatibility with Elasticsearch, Logstash versions starting from 6.7 are compatible with Elasticsearch 7.x. The compatibility matrix can be found at https://www.elastic.co/support/matrix#matrix_compatibility.