The file system based gateway stores the cluster meta data in a file system. Note, since its a distributed system, the file system should be shared between all different nodes.

The location where the gateway stores the cluster state can be set using the gateway.fs.location setting. By default, it will be stored under the work directory. Note, the work directory is considered a temporal directory with ElasticSearch (meaning it is safe to rm -rf it), the default location of the persistent gateway in work intentional, it should be changed.

When explicitly specifying the gateway.fs.location, each node will append its cluster.name to the provided location. It means that the location provided can safely support several clusters.

The file system gateway automatically sets for each index created to use an "fs index gateway":../../../index_modules/gateway/fs. The location specified using gateway.fs.location will automatically be used in this case to store index level data (appended by the index name).