Getting started

Get started building your own plugins, or contributing directly to the Kibana repo.

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.

Fork, then clone the Kibana repo and change directory into it:

git clone https://github.com/[YOUR_USERNAME]/kibana.git kibana
cd kibana

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

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. For more info about this tool, see https://github.com/elastic/kibana/tree/8.5/packages/kbn-pm. If you want more information about how to actively develop over packages please read Kibana Monorepo Packages)

When switching branches which use different versions of npm packages you may need to run:

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.