unmarshal errors in filebeat configuration - yaml

Question

I have configured filebeat for logstash. But while starting the filebeat I am getting following error :
main.go:42: CRIT Config error: Error reading config file: YAML config parsing failed on /etc/filebeat/filebeat.yml: yaml: unmarshal errors:
line 2: cannot unmarshal !!str `paths:
...` into []config.ProspectorConfig. Exiting.
I have configured filebeat on other server with same configuration and there it is working perfectly but I don't understand why am I getting this syntax error on this server.
Here is the configuration file :
filebeat:
prospectors: |-
paths:
'/var/log/*.log'
registry_file: /var/lib/filebeat/registry
config_dir: /etc/filebeat/conf.d
output:
elasticsearch:
enabled: false
hosts:
- 52.35.55.85:9200
logstash:
enabled: true
hosts:
- 52.32.18.237:5044
file:
enabled: false
path: /tmp/filebeat
filename: filebeat
rotate_every_kb: 1000
number_of_files: 7

Answer 1

I don't know anything about filebeat (or even Go, really), but this error message:
cannot unmarshal !!str `paths:
...` into []config.ProspectorConfig. Exiting.
...suggests to me that it's expecing the paths value to be a sequence (YAML parlance for array), not a scalar (string). Instead of this:
paths:
'/var/log/*.log'
...try this:
paths:
- '/var/log/*.log'
...or, since the quotes are extraneous here:
paths:
- /var/log/*.log