According to https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/TESTING.asciidoc it can be done by running run.sh or run.bat, but those guys use mvn.

I see there's been a push to move from maven: #13930. And there's an item there to create a gradle task for this.

I'm new to gradle and the build of elasticsearch, but could folks explain how they startup a node for a little poking around locally - maybe I can script it up. I'm trying to start a node run a few REST calls to get the output for examples in the docs.

My workaround has been to run
gradle assemble

Then extract distribution/tar/build/distributions/elasticsearch-3.0.0-SNAPSHOT.tgz and run ./elasticsearch

Thanks