Plugin tooling

Automatic plugin generator

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 location

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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 distributable

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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 archive

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See How to install a plugin.

Run Kibana with your plugin in dev mode

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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, …]

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