Downloading and Installing elasticsearch

Downloading elasticsearch

Click here to navigate to the elasticsearch download website. There you'll find ZIP, TAR, DEB, RPM modes of downloads available to the users. I personally recommend downloading the ZIP file for windows users and TAR file for linux users. Click on the ZIP/TAR button and you should see your download starting, but sometimes you'll be redirected to a page and nothing happens, in that case, right-click on the ZIP/TAR button and click on "Open link in new tab" option, hopefully this should start your download.

Installation

Strictly speaking there is no particular installation process for this. You should first unzip the downloaded file using 7zip or WinZip. Next...

Wait !! Before trying to run the elasticsearch server, you should make sure you have the JAVA_HOME environment variable set. Note the JAVA_HOME variable points to the JDK installation directory, thats it, don't ever add bin. For further clarity refer here or here

Now...

Windows users:

Open command prompt as an administrator, navigate to bin folder of your elasticsearch directory using 

cd <location-where-you-unzipped-elasticsearch>\elasticsearch-<version>\bin 

then start your elasticsearch node by running elasticsearch.bat command

Linux users:
Open terminal and navigate to bin folder of your elasticsearch directory using 

cd <location-where-you-unzipped-elasticsearch>\elasticsearch-<version>\bin 
then start your elasticsearch node by running ./elasticsearch command

By following the above steps, now you would have started an elasticsearch NODE that joins an existing CLUSTER in your network(if present) or becomes part of the default elasticsearch CLUSTER. Also, in the first case a master NODE is selected, which generally is the NODE that first joins the CLUSTER.