Development process for Fleet UI

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Development process for Fleet UI

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See the Kibana docs for how to set up your dev environment, run Elasticsearch, and start Kibana.

One common development workflow is:

  1. Clone Kibana repo

    git clone https://github.com/[YOUR_USERNAME]/kibana.git kibana
    cd kibana
  2. Install Dependencies

    nvm use
    npm install -g yarn
  3. Bootstrap Kibana

    yarn kbn bootstrap
  4. Start Elasticsearch in one shell

    yarn es snapshot -E xpack.security.authc.api_key.enabled=true
  5. Start Kibana in another shell

    yarn start --xpack.fleet.enabled=true --no-base-path
  6. Download fleet-server package from https://www.elastic.co/downloads/past-releases/#elastic-agent
  7. Untar fleet server tarball and cd to the directory
  8. Install fleet-server (See also the alternative solution)

    sudo ./elastic-agent install  -f \
    --fleet-server-es=http://elastic:changeme@localhost:9200 \
    --fleet-server-policy=<default policy id>

    The default policy id can be retrieved by fleet ui instructions in Kibana before any fleet server is installed. Fleet Server will start in +https://users_machine_ip:8220+

  9. Update Fleet settings on the top right corner of Fleet UI to set the correct Fleet Server hosts (ip from previous step).
  10. After that user can enroll as many agents as they want
  11. Any code update in Kibana fleet plugin should be picked up automatically and either cause the server to restart, or be served to the browser on the next page refresh.

Alternative solution for fleet server

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Instead of download fleet server package and running it as a local process you can run Fleet Server Locally in a Container.

It can be useful to run Fleet Server in a container on your local machine in order to free up your actual "bare metal" machine to run Elastic Agent for testing purposes. Otherwise, you’ll only be able to a single instance of Elastic Agent dedicated to Fleet Server on your local machine, and this can make testing integrations and policies difficult.

The following is adapted from the Fleet Server README

  1. Add the following configuration to your config/kibana.yml

    server.host: 0.0.0.0
  2. Append the following option to the command you use to start Elasticsearch

    -E http.host=0.0.0.0

    This command should look something like this:

    yarn es snapshot --license trial -E xpack.security.authc.api_key.enabled=true -E path.data=/tmp/es-data -E http.host=0.0.0.0
  3. Run the Fleet Server Docker container. Make sure you include a BASE-PATH value if your local Kibana instance is using one. YOUR-IP should correspond to the IP address used by your Docker network to represent the host. For Windows and Mac machines, this should be 192.168.65.2. If you’re not sure what this IP should be, run the following to look it up:

    docker run -it --rm alpine nslookup host.docker.internal

    To run the Fleet Server Docker container:

    docker run -e KIBANA_HOST=http://{YOUR-IP}:5601/{BASE-PATH} -e KIBANA_USERNAME=elastic -e KIBANA_PASSWORD=changeme -e ELASTICSEARCH_HOST=http://{YOUR-IP}:9200 -e ELASTICSEARCH_USERNAME=elastic -e ELASTICSEARCH_PASSWORD=changeme -e KIBANA_FLEET_SETUP=1 -e FLEET_SERVER_ENABLE=1 -e FLEET_SERVER_INSECURE_HTTP=1 -p 8220:8220 docker.elastic.co/elastic-agent/elastic-agent:{VERSION}

    Ensure you provide the -p 8220:8220 port mapping to map the Fleet Server container’s port 8220 to your local machine’s port 8220 in order for Fleet to communicate with Fleet Server.

    For the latest version, use 8.0.0-SNAPSHOT. Otherwise, you can explore the available versions at https://www.docker.elastic.co/r/beats/elastic-agent.

    Once the Fleet Server container is running, you should be able to treat it as if it were a local process running on +http://localhost:8220+ when configuring Fleet via the UI. You can then run elastic-agent on your local machine directly for testing purposes.