Hi folks,

The title describes the essense of my problem pretty much. I'm running ES 5.5.2 on a VM with Ubuntu 16.04 (it's VirtualBox 5.2.6).

All files in the /var/log/elasticsearch directory are empty.

journalctl -u elasticsearch shows pairs of lines like

Jan 24 15:13:57 ivan-VirtualBox systemd[1]: Starting Elasticsearch...
Jan 24 15:13:57 ivan-VirtualBox systemd[1]: Started Elasticsearch.
which I guess correspond to my attempts to run the service.
sudo service elasticsearch status shows
● elasticsearch.service - Elasticsearch
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/elasticsearch.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: inactive (dead) since Mi 2018-01-24 15:13:59 CET; 23min ago
     Docs: http://www.elastic.co
  Process: 7236 ExecStart=/usr/share/elasticsearch/bin/elasticsearch -p ${PID_DIR}/elasticsearch.pid --quiet -Edefault.path.logs=${LOG_DIR} -Edefault.path.data=${DATA_DIR} -Edefault.path.conf=${CONF_DIR} (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
  Process: 7227 ExecStartPre=/usr/share/elasticsearch/bin/elasticsearch-systemd-pre-exec (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
 Main PID: 7236 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Jan 24 15:13:57 ivan-VirtualBox systemd[1]: Starting Elasticsearch...
Jan 24 15:13:57 ivan-VirtualBox systemd[1]: Started Elasticsearch.
I'm using java 8 by Oracle. I tried also to purge it and install OpenJDK, but got exactly same behavior.
I also set chown -R elasticsearch:elasticsearch for directories /var/log/elasticsearch, /var/lib/elasticsearch, /var/run/elasticsearch, /etc/elasticsearch.
How to start the es by you? What's the command?
After you started a while, you can try to run below command to check response:
curl localhost:9200
              
I was starting it by sudo service elasticsearch start.

Also, I checked whether any process was listening the 9200 port. Nothing was there.
However, I actually managed to find a workaround for this problem. I upgraded ES from 5.5.2 to 5.6.6, and it started working just fine. Still no clue what the original issue was.