Getting startededit
Get started building your own plugins, or contributing directly to the Kibana repo.
Developing on Windowsedit
We do not support Windows native development anymore and in order to develop Kibana on Windows please setup a WSL environment which will give you a much better experience. In addition to that you will also benefit from run GUI apps on WSL like Chrome for test and debug purposes. Once completed, follow the rest of this guide inside the WSL.
Get the codeedit
Fork, then clone the Kibana repo and change directory into it:
git clone https://github.com/[YOUR_USERNAME]/kibana.git kibana cd kibana
Install dependenciesedit
Install the version of Node.js listed in the .node-version file. This
can be automated with tools such as
nvm or
avn. As we also include a .nvmrc file
you can switch to the correct version when using nvm by running:
nvm use
Install the latest version of yarn v1.
Bootstrap Kibana and install all the dependencies:
yarn kbn bootstrap
Node.js native modules could be in use and node-gyp is the tool used to build them. There are tools you need to install per platform and python versions you need to be using. Please see https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp#installation and follow the guide according your platform.
In case you don’t have an internet connection, the yarn kbn bootstrap command will
fail. As it is likely you have the required node_modules in the
offline mirror, you can try to run the step in offline mode by using:
yarn kbn bootstrap --offline
In any other circumstance where you want to force the node_modules install step you can use:
yarn kbn bootstrap --force-install
You can also run yarn kbn to see the other available commands.
When switching branches which use different versions of npm packages you may need to run:
yarn kbn clean
Running this command is only necessary in rare circumstance where you need to recover a consistent state when problems arise. If you need to run this command often, complete this form to provide feedback: https://ela.st/yarn-kbn-clean
If you have failures during yarn kbn bootstrap you may have some
corrupted packages in your yarn cache which you can clean with:
yarn cache clean
Configure environmental settingsedit
Increase node.js heap sizeedit
Kibana is a big project and for some commands it can happen that the
process hits the default heap limit and crashes with an out-of-memory
error. If you run into this problem, you can increase maximum heap size
by setting the --max_old_space_size option on the command line. To set
the limit for all commands, simply add the following line to your shell
config: export NODE_OPTIONS="--max_old_space_size=2048".
Run Elasticsearchedit
Run the latest Elasticsearch snapshot. Specify an optional license with the --license flag.
yarn es snapshot --license trial
trial will give you access to all capabilities.
Read about more options for Running Elasticsearch during development, like connecting to a remote host, running from source, preserving data inbetween runs, running remote cluster, etc.
Run Kibanaedit
In another terminal window, start up Kibana. Include developer examples by adding an optional --run-examples flag.
yarn start --run-examples
View all available options by running yarn start --help
Read about more advanced options for Running Kibana.
Install pre-commit hook (optional)edit
In case you want to run a couple of checks like linting or check the file casing of the files to commit, we provide a way to install a pre-commit hook. To configure it you just need to run the following:
node scripts/register_git_hook
After the script completes the pre-commit hook will be created within the file .git/hooks/pre-commit.
If you choose to not install it, don’t worry, we still run a quick ci check to provide feedback earliest as we can about the same checks.
Code away!edit
You are now ready to start developing. Changes to your files should be picked up automatically. Server side changes will cause the Kibana server to reboot.