Plugin tooling

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
		

Pass --name <plugin_name> with -y to generate non-interactively using the defaults.

External plugins live in a plugins/ directory at the root of your Kibana checkout, for example:

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

The plugins/ directory is gitignored, so your plugin is not tracked alongside the Kibana sources. Kibana discovers external plugins by scanning this directory at startup and reading each plugin's kibana.json manifest, so you do not need to run yarn kbn bootstrap after dropping in a new plugin or editing its manifest.

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 azip archive in kibana/plugins/my_plugin_name/build/ folder.

See How to install a plugin.

External plugins use a two-terminal workflow in development. Unlike in-repo plugins, their browser bundles are not built by the Kibana optimizer at startup, so you drive the build yourself from inside the plugin directory.

In the first terminal, build and watch the browser bundle from the plugin root:

cd plugins/my_plugin_name
yarn dev --watch
		

In a second terminal, run yarn start from the Kibana root. Confirm Kibana discovered your plugin by looking for it in the startup logs:

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