Workaround with Oracle Java 1.8.0_131 is to open file <jre>/lib/security/java.policy and add this line to grant section (i.e. between curly brackets):

permission javax.management.MBeanTrustPermission "register";

Why workaround? The upright solution would be to specify extra grant section which code exactly should get this permission.

got the same error and the answer is here java.security.AccessControlException when using Ant, but runs ok when invoking java from console

Append the grant section in java.policy file with permission javax.management.MBeanTrustPermission "register";

I had this same issue when moving from a single instance to two instances locally.

I tried what Alice suggested above. Even re-installed Elasticsearch (5.5.0). I also updated my Java to the latest one for Linux provided by Oracle.

Nothing was working. Then I discovered, that I couldn't just take the elasticsearch-5.5.0/config directory and rename it to elasticsearch-5.5.0/node1.

So... I had to leave that config directory in place and clone it to node1/node2.

EVEN if I configure path.config in the runtime args, ES still needs that base line config directory.

Hope this helps.

I faced same issue on Ubuntu-16.04 system. Solution: ElasticSeearch service is not allowed to run for "ROOT" user. That's why change the ownership of elasticsearch folder with below command: go to Elasticseach installation directory

$ sudo chown -R user_name:user_Group elasticsearch-5.5.0

$/bin/elasticsearch

this will start elasticsearch service. It is working form me perfectly.