Running Kibana on Docker

Docker images for Kibana are available from the Elastic Docker registry. The base image is centos:7.

A list of all published Docker images and tags is available at www.docker.elastic.co. The source code is in GitHub.

These images are free to use under the Elastic license. They contain open source and free commercial features and access to paid commercial features. Start a 30-day trial to try out all of the paid commercial features. See the Subscriptions page for information about Elastic license levels.

Obtaining Kibana for Docker is as simple as issuing a docker pull command against the Elastic Docker registry.

docker pull docker.elastic.co/kibana/kibana:7.4.2

Alternatively, you can download other Docker images that contain only features available under the Apache 2.0 license. To download the images, go to www.docker.elastic.co.

Kibana can be quickly started and connected to a local Elasticsearch container for development or testing use with the following command:

docker run --link YOUR_ELASTICSEARCH_CONTAINER_NAME_OR_ID:elasticsearch -p 5601:5601 docker.elastic.co/kibana/kibana:7.4.2

The Docker images provide several methods for configuring Kibana. The conventional approach is to provide a kibana.yml file as described in Configuring Kibana, but it’s also possible to use environment variables to define settings.

One way to configure Kibana on Docker is to provide kibana.yml via bind-mounting. With docker-compose, the bind-mount can be specified like this:

version: '2'
services:
  kibana:
    image: docker.elastic.co/kibana/kibana:7.4.2
    volumes:
      - ./kibana.yml:/usr/share/kibana/config/kibana.yml

Under Docker, Kibana can be configured via environment variables. When the container starts, a helper process checks the environment for variables that can be mapped to Kibana command-line arguments.

For compatibility with container orchestration systems, these environment variables are written in all capitals, with underscores as word separators. The helper translates these names to valid Kibana setting names.

Some example translations are shown here:

In general, any setting listed in Configuring Kibana can be configured with this technique.

These variables can be set with docker-compose like this:

version: '2'
services:
  kibana:
    image: docker.elastic.co/kibana/kibana:7.4.2
    environment:
      SERVER_NAME: kibana.example.org
      ELASTICSEARCH_HOSTS: http://elasticsearch.example.org

Since environment variables are translated to CLI arguments, they take precedence over settings configured in kibana.yml.

The following settings have different default values when using the Docker images:

These settings are defined in the default kibana.yml. They can be overridden with a custom kibana.yml or via environment variables.