Installing Plugins

Use the following command to install a plugin:

bin/kibana-plugin install <package name or URL>

When you specify a plugin name without a URL, the plugin tool attempts to download an official Elastic plugin, such as:

$ bin/kibana-plugin install x-pack

You can download official Elastic plugins simply by specifying their name. You can alternatively specify a URL to a specific plugin, as in the following example:

$ bin/kibana-plugin install https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/packs/x-pack/x-pack-6.1.4.zip

You can specify URLs that use the HTTP, HTTPS, or file protocols.

Use the -d or --plugin-dir option after the install command to specify a directory for plugins, as in the following example:

$ bin/kibana-plugin install file:///some/local/path/my-plugin.zip -d path/to/directory

The Kibana server needs to be able to write to files in the optimize directory. If you’re installing plugins using sudo or su you’ll want to make sure these commands are ran as the user kibana. This user is already added for you as part of the package installation.

$ sudo -u kibana bin/kibana-plugin install x-pack

If plugins were installed as a different user and the server is not starting, then you will need to change the owner of these files:

$ chown -R kibana:kibana /path/to/kibana/optimize

Kibana supports plugin installation via a proxy. It uses the http_proxy and https_proxy environment variables to detect a proxy for HTTP and HTTPS URLs.

It also respects the no_proxy environment variable to exclude specific URLs from proxying.

You can specify the environment variable directly when installing plugins:

$ http_proxy="http://proxy.local:4242" bin/kibana-plugin install <package name or URL>