Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/elasticsearch/common/jackson/dataformat/yaml/snakeyaml/error/YAMLException

[reanjr]

Using freshly installed elasticsearch package, with START_DAEMON=true set in /etc/default/elasticsearch, when I attempt to start the elasticsearch service, it exits immediately with no error. I expect it to start the elasticsearch service, and continue running.

I tracked the elasticsearch.service systemd file, which runs /etc/init.d/elasticsearch start, which executes start-stop-daemon, which then effectively calls the following command:

sudo -uelasticsearch /usr/share/elasticsearch/bin/elasticsearch -p /var/run/elasticsearch.pid -Des.default.config=/etc/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.yml -Des.default.path.home=/usr/share/elasticsearch -Des.default.path.logs=/var/log/elasticsearch -Des.default.path.data=/var/lib/elasticsearch -Des.default.path.work=/tmp/elasticsearch -Des.default.path.conf=/etc/elasticsearch

When I run that command, I get the following error:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/elasticsearch/common/jackson/dataformat/yaml/snakeyaml/error/YAMLException
 at org.elasticsearch.common.jackson.dataformat.yaml.YAMLFactory._createParser(YAMLFactory.java:426)
 at org.elasticsearch.common.jackson.dataformat.yaml.YAMLFactory.createParser(YAMLFactory.java:327)
 at org.elasticsearch.common.xcontent.yaml.YamlXContent.createParser(YamlXContent.java:90)
 at org.elasticsearch.common.settings.loader.XContentSettingsLoader.load(XContentSettingsLoader.java:45)
 at org.elasticsearch.common.settings.loader.YamlSettingsLoader.load(YamlSettingsLoader.java:46)
 at org.elasticsearch.common.settings.ImmutableSettings$Builder.loadFromStream(ImmutableSettings.java:982)
 at org.elasticsearch.common.settings.ImmutableSettings$Builder.loadFromUrl(ImmutableSettings.java:969)
 at org.elasticsearch.node.internal.InternalSettingsPreparer.prepareSettings(InternalSettingsPreparer.java:95)
 at org.elasticsearch.bootstrap.Bootstrap.initialSettings(Bootstrap.java:144)
 at org.elasticsearch.bootstrap.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:215)
 at org.elasticsearch.bootstrap.Elasticsearch.main(Elasticsearch.java:32)
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.elasticsearch.common.jackson.dataformat.yaml.snakeyaml.error.YAMLException
 at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:381)
 at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:424)
 at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:331)
 at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:357)
 ... 11 more

I confirmed the libyaml-snake-java package is installed. This seems to be a bug in the elasticsearch package.

Description: Ubuntu 16.10
Release: 16.10

elasticsearch:
  Installed: 1.7.5-1
  Candidate: 1.7.5-1
  Version table:
 *** 1.7.5-1 500
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu yakkety/universe amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

Thanks for taking your time to report this issue and help making Ubuntu better.

This issue has also been reported upstream in Debian (see the attached bug watch).