Tech Notes:- Filebeat fails with the message Exiting: Registry file path must be a file. /var/lib/filebeat/registry is a directory

Filebeat fails with the message 

"Exiting: Registry file path must be a file. /var/lib/filebeat/registry is a directory.

This usually happens when you have installed a higher version of filebeat, removed it, and then installed a lower version. In my case, I installed version 7.x and then I found that it is not compatible with Elasticsearch 6.x.So I removed it and then installed filebeat 6.8.x.It worked initially and then after a restart, this error started appearing. The solution is simple. Just remove the directory /var/lib/filebeat/registry and then start filebeat