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Elastic network drive connector referenceedit

The Elastic network drive connector is a connector for network drive data sources.

Availability and prerequisitesedit

This connector is available as a native connector on Elastic Cloud, as of 8.9.1.

This connector is available as a self-managed connector client using the Elastic connector framework.

This connector client is compatible with Elastic versions 8.6.0+.

To use this connector, satisfy all connector client requirements.

Usageedit

To use this connector as a native connector, see Native connectors logo cloud (managed service).

To use this connector as a connector client, see Connector clients.

Configurationedit

When using the connector client workflow, initially these fields will use the default configuration set in the connector source code. These are set in the get_default_configuration function definition.

These configurable fields will be rendered with their respective labels in the Kibana UI. Once connected, you’ll be able to update these values in Kibana.

The following configuration fields are required to set up the connector:

username
The username of the account for the network drive. The user must have at least read permissions for the folder path provided.
password
The password of the account to be used for crawling the network drive.
server_ip
The server IP address where the network drive is hosted. Default value is 127.0.0.1.
server_port
The server port where the network drive service is available. Default value is 445.
drive_path
  • The network drive path the connector will crawl to fetch files. This is the name of the folder shared via SMB. The connector uses the Python smbprotocol library which supports both SMB v2 and v3.
  • Accepts only one path— parent folders can be specified to widen the scope.

  • The drive path should use forward slashes as path separators. Example:

    • admin/bin

Deployment using Dockeredit

You can deploy the Network drive connector as a self-managed connector client using Docker. Follow these instructions.

Step 1: Download sample configuration file

Download the sample configuration file. You can either download it manually or run the following command:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elastic/connectors/main/config.yml.example --output ~/connectors-config/config.yml

Remember to update the --output argument value if your directory name is different, or you want to use a different config file name.

Step 2: Update the configuration file for your self-managed connector

Update the configuration file with the following settings to match your environment:

  • elasticsearch.host
  • elasticsearch.api_key
  • connectors

If you’re running the connector service against a Dockerized version of Elasticsearch and Kibana, your config file will look like this:

# When connecting to your cloud deployment you should edit the host value
elasticsearch.host: http://host.docker.internal:9200
elasticsearch.api_key: <ELASTICSEARCH_API_KEY>

connectors:
  -
    connector_id: <CONNECTOR_ID_FROM_KIBANA>
    service_type: network_drive
    api_key: <CONNECTOR_API_KEY_FROM_KIBANA>

Using the elasticsearch.api_key is the recommended authentication method. However, you can also use elasticsearch.username and elasticsearch.password to authenticate with your Elasticsearch instance.

Note: You can change other default configurations by simply uncommenting specific settings in the configuration file and modifying their values.

Step 3: Run the Docker image

Run the Docker image with the Connector Service using the following command:

docker run \
-v ~/connectors-config:/config \
--network "elastic" \
--tty \
--rm \
docker.elastic.co/enterprise-search/elastic-connectors:8.10.4.0 \
/app/bin/elastic-ingest \
-c /config/config.yml

Refer to DOCKER.md in the elastic/connectors repo for more details.

Find all available Docker images in the official registry.

Documents and syncsedit

The connector syncs folders as separate documents in Elasticsearch. The following fields will be added for the document type folder:

  • create_time
  • title
  • path
  • modified
  • time
  • id
  • Files bigger than 10 MB won’t be extracted.
  • Permission are not synced. All documents indexed to an Elastic deployment will be visible to all users with access to that Elastic Deployment.

Sync rulesedit

Basic sync rules are identical for all connectors and are available by default.

Advanced sync rulesedit

A full sync is required for advanced sync rules to take effect.

Advanced sync rules are defined through a source-specific DSL JSON snippet. Advanced sync rules for this connector use glob patterns.

  1. Each rule must contains a glob pattern. This pattern is then matched against all the available folder paths inside the configured drive path.
  2. The pattern must begin with the drive_path field configured in the connector.
  3. If the pattern matches any available folder paths, the contents directly within those folders will be fetched.

The following sections provide examples of advanced sync rules for this connector.

Indexing files and folders recursively within foldersedit
[
  {
    "pattern": "Folder-shared/a/mock/**"
  },
  {
    "pattern": "Folder-shared/b/alpha/**"
  }
]
Indexing files and folders directly inside folderedit
[
  {
    "pattern": "Folder-shared/a/b/test"
  }
]
Indexing files and folders directly inside a set of foldersedit
[
  {
    "pattern": "Folder-shared/org/*/all-tests/test[135]"
  }
]
Excluding files and folders that match a patternedit
[
  {
    "pattern": "Folder-shared/**/all-tests/test[!7]"
  }
]

Content extractionedit

See Content extraction.

End-to-end testsedit

The connector framework enables operators to run functional tests against a real data source. Refer to Connector testing for more details.

To execute a functional test for the Network Drive connector client, run the following command:

$ make ftest NAME=network_drive

By default, this will use a medium-sized dataset. For faster tests add the DATA_SIZE=small flag:

make ftest NAME=network_drive DATA_SIZE=small

Known issuesedit

There are no known issues for this connector.

See Known issues for any issues affecting all connectors.

Troubleshootingedit

See Troubleshooting.

Securityedit

See Security.

Framework and sourceedit

This connector is included in the Elastic connector framework.

View the source code for this connector (branch 8.10, compatible with Elastic 8.10).

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