Elasticsearch Curator has been around for many different versions of Elasticsearch. Earlier releases of Curator supported multiple versions of Elasticsearch, but this is no longer the case.

Curator is now major version locked with Elasticsearch, which means that if Curator's major version is 8, it should support any Elasticsearch 8.x release, Curator 7 works with Elasticsearch 7.x, and Curator 6 works with Elasticsearch 6.x.

Docker-based Curator requires you to map a volume for your configuration files. Neglecting to volume map your configuration directory to /.curator and attempting to pass options at the command-line will not work.

It looks like this:

docker run --rm --name myimagename \
  -v /PATH/TO/MY/CONFIGS:/.curator \
  untergeek/curator:mytag          \
--config /.curator/config.yml /.curator/actionfile.yml

Both of the files config.yml and actionfile.yml should already exist in the path /PATH/TO/MY/CONFIGS before run time.

The --rm in the command means that the container (not the image) will be deleted after completing execution. You definitely want this as there is no reason to keep creating containers for each run. The eventual cleanup from this would be unpleasant.