Plugin toolingedit

Automatic plugin generatoredit

We recommend that you kick-start your plugin by generating it with the Kibana Plugin Generator. Run the following in the Kibana repo, and you will be asked a couple of questions, see some progress bars, and have a freshly generated plugin ready for you to play with in Kibana’s plugins folder.

node scripts/generate_plugin

Plugin locationedit

The Kibana directory must be named kibana, and your plugin directory should be located in the root of kibana in a plugins directory, for example:

.
└── kibana
    └── plugins
        ├── foo-plugin
        └── bar-plugin

Build plugin distributableedit

Kibana distributable is not shipped with @kbn/optimizer anymore. You need to pre-build your plugin for use in production.

You can leverage @kbn/plugin-helpers to build a distributable archive for your plugin. The package transpiles the plugin code, adds polyfills, and links necessary js modules in the runtime. You don’t need to install the plugin-helpers dependency. If you created the plugin using node scripts/generate_plugin script, package.json is already pre-configured. To build your plugin run within your plugin folder:

yarn build

It will output a`zip` archive in kibana/plugins/my_plugin_name/build/ folder.

Install a plugin from archiveedit

See How to install a plugin.

Run Kibana with your plugin in dev modeedit

If your plugin isn’t server only and contains ui in order for Kibana to pick the browser bundles you need to run yarn dev --watch in the plugin root folder at a dedicated terminal.

Then, in a second terminal, run yarn start at the Kibana root folder. Make sure Kibana found and bootstrapped your plugin by:

[INFO ][plugins-system.standard] Setting up […] plugins: […, myPluginName, …]