Running an instance in the foreground using the –f option is comfortable for testing or development. In the real world, an instance should be managed by the operating system tools; it should start automatically during system boot and close correctly when the system is shut down. This is simple when using a system like Linux Debian. ElasticSearch has the deb archive available with all the necessary scripts. If you don't use the deb archive, you can always use the ElasticSearch service wrapper (https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-servicewrapper), which provides all the needed startup scripts.