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Connector clients (self-managed) | Enterprise Search documentation [8.15] | Elastic
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Connector clients (self-managed)

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Connector clients (self-managed)

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Connector clients are Elastic connectors that you self-manage on your own infrastructure. This means they run outside of your Elastic deployment.

You can run connectors from source or from a Docker container. See our deployment guide for more information. For a concrete end-to-end example, see PostgreSQL connector client tutorial.

We also have a quickstart option using Docker Compose, to spin up all the required services at once: elasticsearch, Kibana, and the connectors service. Refer to Docker Compose quickstart for more information.

The following connectors are available as connector clients:

Availability and Elastic prerequisites

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Connector clients currently don’t support Windows. Use this compatability matrix to check which operating systems are supported by connector clients. Find this information under Connector Clients on that page.

Expand to see the Elastic prerequisites

Your Elastic deployment must include the following Elastic services:

  • elasticsearch
  • Kibana

(A new Elastic Cloud deployment includes these services by default.)

To run connector clients, your self-deployed connector service version must match your elasticsearch version. For example, if you’re running elasticsearch 8.10.1, your connector service should be version 8.10.1.x. Elastic does not support deployments running mismatched versions (except during upgrades).

As of 8.10.0 new self-managed connectors no longer require the Enterprise Search service. However, if you are upgrading connectors from versions earlier than 8.9, you’ll need to run Enterprise Search once to migrate your connectors to the new format. In future releases, you may still need to run Enterprise Search for the purpose of migrations or upgrades.

You must have access to Kibana and have write indices privileges for the .elastic-connectors index.

You must additionally deploy the connector service. See Deploying self-managed connectors.

Support and licensing

Depending on how you use connector clients, support and licensing requirements will vary.

Refer to the following subscriptions pages for details. Find your connector of interest in the Elastic Search section under Client Integrations:

Note the following information regarding support for connector clients:

  • A converted but unmodified native connector is supported by Elastic.
  • A converted but customized native connector is not supported by Elastic.

Data source prerequisites

The first decision you need to make before deploying a connector is which third party service (data source) you want to sync to elasticsearch. Note that each data source will have specific prerequisites you’ll need to meet to authorize the connector to access its data. For example, certain data sources may require you to create an OAuth application, or create a service account.

You’ll need to check the individual connector documentation for these details.

Tutorials

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These examples use the PostgreSQL connector but the basic process is the same for all connector clients.

Connector testing

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The connector framework enables you to run end-to-end (E2E) tests on your connector clients, against a real data source.

To avoid tampering with a real elasticsearch instance, E2E tests run an isolated elasticsearch instance in Docker. Configuration values are set in your docker-compose.yml file. Docker Compose manages the setup of the development environment, including both the mock Elastic instance and mock data source.

E2E tests use default configuration values for the connector. Find instructions about testing in each connector’s documentation.

Connector framework

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The Elastic connector framework enables you to:

  • Customize existing connector clients.
  • Build your own connector clients.

Refer to Elastic connector framework for more information.

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