All shards failed

Question

I was working on elastic search and it was working perfectly. Today I just restarted my remote server (Ubuntu). Now I am searching in my indexes, it is giving me this error.

Answer 1

It is possible on your restart some shards were not recovered, causing the cluster to stay red.
If you hit:
http://<yourhost>:9200/_cluster/health/?level=shards you can look for red shards.

I have had issues on restart where shards end up in a non recoverable state. My solution was to simply delete that index completely. That is not an ideal solution for everyone.

It is also nice to visualize issues like this with a plugin like:
Elasticsearch Head

Answer 2

If you're running a single node cluster for some reason, you might simply need to do avoid replicas, like this:

curl -XPUT -H 'Content-Type: application/json' 'localhost:9200/_settings' -d '
{
    "index" : {
        "number_of_replicas" : 0
    }
}'

Doing this you'll force to use es without replicas

Answer 3

If you encounter this apparent index corruption in a running system, you can work around it by deleting all files called segments.gen. It is advisory only, and Lucene can recover correctly without it.

From ElasticSearch Blog