Sometimes you just want to run a single Elasticsearch node and not have it constantly alert that it has no were to write its replicas. Since Elasticsearch and more templates default to at least 1 replica we have to make changes to Elasticsearch and to the templates. First change the default:

curl -XPUT 'localhost:9200/_settings' -d '
{
    "index" : {
        "number_of_replicas" : 0
    }
}
'

Then we can list all the templates and figure out which ones need updates as well

curl -XGET -H 'Content-Type: application/json' 'localhost:9200/_template/*?pretty'

Then for each of the templates you want to update. For instance to update a Logstash template use the following:

curl -XPUT -H 'Content-Type: application/json' 'localhost:9200/logstash-*/_settings' -d '{ "number_of_replicas" : 0 } }'