Plugin Resources

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

Our contributing guide can help you get a development environment going.

We recommend that you kick-start your plugin by generating it with the Kibana Plugin Generator. Run the following in the Kibana repo, and you will be asked a couple questions, see some progress bars, and have a freshly generated plugin ready for you to play with in Kibana’s plugins folder.

node scripts/generate_plugin my_plugin_name # replace "my_plugin_name" with your desired plugin name

The Kibana directory must be named kibana, and your plugin directory should be located in the root of kibana in a plugins directory, for example:

.
└── kibana
    └── plugins
        ├── foo-plugin
        └── bar-plugin

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.

Plugin code can be written in TypeScript if desired. To enable TypeScript support, create a tsconfig.json file at the root of your plugin that looks something like this:

{
  // extend Kibana's tsconfig, or use your own settings
  "extends": "../../kibana/tsconfig.json",

  // tell the TypeScript compiler where to find your source files
  "include": [
    "server/**/*",
    "public/**/*"
  ]
}

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.