I tried to check it via
curl -XGET 'http://localhost:9200/_cluster/health'
but nothing happened. Seems it's waiting for something. The console did not come back. Had to kill it with CTRL+C.
I also tried to check for existing indices via
curl -XGET 'http://localhost:9200/_cat/indices?v'
Same behavior as above.
To check on elasticsearch cluster health you need to use
curl localhost:9200/_cat/health
More on the cat APIs here.
I usually use elasticsearch-head plugin to visualize that.
You can find it's github project here.
It's easy to install sudo $ES_HOME/bin/plugin -i mobz/elasticsearch-head
and then you can open localhost:9200/_plugin/head/
in your web brower.
You should have something that looks like this :