Hey, I am very new to Search Guard and I was wondering how to install the community version. I installed the demo version and it worked perfectly. However it comes with a 60 day trial. It says in the official documentation to install the Enterprise version first and then disable the Enterprise modules to obtain the Community version. Do I need to contact Search Guard support or is their open source zip files to download? Forgive me, I am a true novice with this 
No, you do not need to contact us at all for the Community edition.
We only provide one download, with all Community and Enterprise features enabled, there is no separate Community download. You can find all version here:
SG7 for ES7:
SG6 for ES6:
If you want to run the Community edition only, then just disable the enterprise features in elasticsearch.yml and you are good to go:
Admitted, we could make that a bit more obvious in the docs.
Thank you for clarifying this for me Jochen. I disabled the enterprise modules connected to my original install. I’d imagine any config changes now must be done via the config files i.e. add user, permissions to create dashboards etc?
Yes, this is correct. You need to change the config files, and then upload the changes via the sgadmin tool.
Search Guard keeps all configuration settings in an Elasticsearch index. This enables configuration hot-reloading, so you can make changes without the need to restart your cluster and without the need to keep config files in sync on your nodes.
If you have used the demo installer, then you will find an sgadmin_demo.sh script in the tools folder. This is a pre-configured sgadmin call with all command line switches already set. It will populate the SG index with the files in the sgconfig directory.
Yes I understand. I executed the sgadmin command to see if the works as expected and it does thankfully. The next challenge will be to configure the .yml files. is there any guides on how to add internal users, map roles etc.
We are in the process of publishing a “First Steps” section on the docs, but this will take another couple of days.
There is a comprehensive, but also rather long article out there written by a SG user:
Basically what you need to do is (all links here are for SG7, if you use SG6 please choose the correct version in the docs. The config format differs slightly between 6 and 7):
- Add users to sg_internal_users.yml file
- Generate a hashed password for each user
- Define your roles in sg_roles.yml:
- Map the users created in the first step to the roles you created in the second step:
You can check that the users, roles and mappings are correct by following this guide:
And finally, if you run into problems with setting the correct permissions for your role(s), we have this troubleshooting guide here:
Thanks Jochen 
Hey Jochen, I am able to create users, map to roles and have dashboards only in place for kibana users. Is there any way to set specific dashboards to specific users? This is the last piece of functionality I need!! can you point me in the right direction?
Answered here: Specific Dashboards for specific users - #5 by Richie