Installing OpenSearch Dashboards

OpenSearch Dashboards provides a fully integrated solution for visually exploring, discovering, and querying your observability data. You can install OpenSearch Dashboards with any of the following options:

Browser compatibility

OpenSearch Dashboards supports the following web browsers:

  • Chrome
  • Firefox
  • Safari
  • Edge (Chromium)

Other Chromium-based browsers might work, as well. Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge Legacy are not supported.

Node.js compatibility

OpenSearch Dashboards requires the Node.js runtime binary to run. One is included in the distribution packages available from the OpenSearch downloads page.

OpenSearch Dashboards 2.8.0 and newer can use Node.js versions 14, 16, and 18. The distribution packages for OpenSearch Dashboards 2.10.0 and newer include Node.js 18 and 14 (for backward compatibility).

To use a Node.js runtime binary other than the ones included in the distribution packages, follow these steps:

  1. Download and install Node.js; the compatible versions are >=14.20.1 <19.

  2. Set the installation path to the NODE_HOME or NODE_OSD_HOME environment variables.

    • On UNIX, if Node.js is installed to /usr/local/nodejs and the runtime binary is /usr/local/nodejs/bin/node:

      1.  export NODE_HOME=/usr/local/nodejs

    • If Node.js is installed using NVM and the runtime binary is /Users/user/.nvm/versions/node/v18.19.0/bin/node:

      1. export NODE_HOME=/Users/user/.nvm/versions/node/v18.19.0
      2. # or, if NODE_HOME is used for something else:
      3. export NODE_OSD_HOME=/Users/user/.nvm/versions/node/v18.19.0

    • On Windows, if Node.js is installed to C:\Program Files\nodejs and the runtime binary is C:\Program Files\nodejs\node.exe:

      1. set "NODE_HOME=C:\Program Files\nodejs"
      2. # or using PowerShell:
      3. $Env:NODE_HOME = 'C:\Program Files\nodejs'

    Consult your operating system’s documentation to make a persistent change to the environment variables.

The OpenSearch Dashboards start script,bin/opensearch-dashboards, searches for the Node.js runtime binary using NODE_OSD_HOME, and then NODE_HOME, before using the binaries included with the distribution packages. If a usable Node.js runtime binary is not found, the start script will attempt to find one in the system-wide PATH before failing.

Configuration

To learn how to configure TLS for OpenSearch Dashboards, see Configure TLS.