Before you can work with Couchbase and Elasticsearch, you need to set up Couchbase Plug-in for Elasticsearch, a Couchbase 2.0 or later cluster, and an Elasticsearch cluster. After you install the clusters, start them. The Couchbase cluster stores any items from your application and sends replicas of these items to the Elasticsearch cluster for indexing. Your Couchbase cluster can contain one or more instances of Couchbase server, and your Elasticsearch cluster can contain one or more instances of the search engine.

For now, you probably need only one instance of Couchbase Server running in a cluster and one instance of the Elasticsearch engine. Later as you test your integration under load and deploy your implementation, you will need to add more servers to handle the workload. At this phase, the most important point about the Couchbase Server installation is to make sure that you include the beer-sample data, which is available as an installation option. The examples in this guide build on data contained in the sample database.