Plugin Resources

Here are some resources that are helpful for getting started with plugin development.

Some light reading

If you haven’t already, start with Getting started. If you are planning to add your plugin to the Kibana repo, read the Contributing guide, if you are building a plugin externally, read External plugin development. In both cases, read up on our recommended Best practices.

Creating an empty plugin

You can use the Automatic plugin generator to get a basic structure for a new plugin. Plugins that are not part of the Kibana repo should be developed inside the plugins folder. If you are building a new plugin to check in to the Kibana repo, you will choose between a few locations:

  • x-pack/plugins for commercially licensed plugins
  • src/plugins for open source licensed plugins
  • examples for developer example plugins (these will not be included in the distributables)

Elastic UI Framework

If you’re developing a plugin that has a user interface, take a look at our Elastic UI Framework. It documents the CSS and React components we use to build Kibana’s user interface.

You’re welcome to use these components, but be aware that they are rapidly evolving, and we might introduce breaking changes that will disrupt your plugin’s UI.

TypeScript Support

We recommend your plugin code is written in TypeScript. To enable TypeScript support, create a tsconfig.json file at the root of your plugin that looks something like this:

  1. {
  2.   // extend {kib}'s tsconfig, or use your own settings
  3.   "extends": "../../kibana/tsconfig.json",
  5.   // tell the TypeScript compiler where to find your source files
  6.   "include": [
  7.     "server/**/*",
  8.     "public/**/*"
  9.   ]
  10. }

TypeScript code is automatically converted into JavaScript during development, but not in the distributable version of Kibana. If you use the @kbn/plugin-helpers to build your plugin, then your .ts and .tsx files will be permanently transpiled before your plugin is archived. If you have your own build process, make sure to run the TypeScript compiler on your source files and ship the compilation output so that your plugin will work with the distributable version of Kibana.

Kibana platform migration guide

This guide provides an action plan for moving a legacy plugin to the new platform.

Externally developed plugins

If you are building a plugin outside of the Kibana repo, read External plugin development.

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