There might be several reasons for elastic search failures during the bootstrap process from the docker container. You might get incredibly frustrated in case you don’t have any clue about what is going on. It was such a case for me recently. In case you face such clueless failures one of the parts you should check is the resource settings of your docker desktop preferences. In my case, the memory upper limit was set to 2GB, which was insufficient for Elasticsearch to bootstrap as a docker container. Increasing the memory limit made the trick
Aside from this error, I noticed another error during my trial and error process which is caused by missing environment variable discovery.type.
the default discovery settings are unsuitable for production use; at least one of [discovery.seed_hosts, discovery.seed_providers, cluster.initial_master_nodes] must be configured
It should be set as single-node within the docker-compose file if you are starting your container via it, or given as an environment variable parameter if you are running the container via docker run.
elasticsearch:
image: docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.8.1
container_name: elasticsearch
environment:
- xpack.security.enabled=false
- discovery.type=single-node