Plugin management

Plugins extend {{es}}'s core functionality and can serve various purposes, including:

National language support, phonetic analysis, and extended unicode support
Ingesting attachments in common formats and ingesting information about the geographic location of IP addresses
Adding new field datatypes to {{es}}
Discovery plugins, such as the cloud AWS plugin that allows discovering nodes on EC2 instances
Analysis plugins, to provide analyzers targeted at languages other than English
Scripting plugins, to provide additional scripting languages

How you add and manage plugins depends on where {{es}} runs:

Hosted Cloud deployments such as {{ech}} and {{ece}} expose plugin and extension management in the Cloud console and API.
Self-managed deployments — use a configuration file with the official Docker image, or the elasticsearch-plugin CLI for package and archive installs.
On {{eck}} deployments you install plugins by building a custom container image or using init containers.

::::{note} {{serverless-full}} projects {{serverless-full}} projects do not support installing plugins or uploading custom plugins and bundles. {{serverless-short}} includes core analysis plugins by default. To manage synonyms, use the synonyms API. For other differences between {{ech}} and {{serverless-short}} on plugins, bundles, and custom dictionaries, see Compare {{ech}} and Serverless. ::::

Managing plugins for {{ech}} [managing-plugins-for-ech]

{applies_to}

    ess: ga

{{ech}} simplifies plugin management by offering compatible plugins for your {{es}} version. These plugins are automatically upgraded with your deployment, except when there are breaking changes.

To add plugins to a hosted deployment, refer to:

Managing plugins for {{ece}} [managing-plugins-for-ece]

{applies_to}

    ece: ga

{{ece}} provides built-in plugins that work with your version of {{es}} and are upgraded along with your deployment, unless there are breaking changes.

To add plugins to an {{ece}} deployment, refer to:

Managing plugins for self-managed deployments [managing-plugins-for-self-managed]

{applies_to}

    self: ga

How you manage plugins depends on how you install {{es}}:

If you run {{es}} using the official {{es}} Docker image, manage plugins with a declarative configuration file.
For all other installation methods, use the elasticsearch-plugin command-line tool to install, list, and remove plugins.

Manage plugins with the Docker image

List the plugins you want in elasticsearch-plugins.yml in your config directory. Each time the container starts, {{es}} syncs installed plugins to match that list: installing missing plugins, removing ones you deleted from the file, and upgrading official plugins when you upgrade {{es}}.

To add or remove a plugin, edit the file and restart the container. Do not use elasticsearch-plugin install or remove as those commands are disabled when elasticsearch-plugins.yml is present.

Refer to the following pages:

Manage plugins with package and archive installs [manage-plugins-with-package-and-archive-installs]

Use the elasticsearch-plugin command-line tool. It is located in the $ES_HOME/bin directory by default, but it might be in a different location depending on which {{es}} package you installed. For more information, see Plugins directory.

Run the following command to get usage instructions:

sudo bin/elasticsearch-plugin -h

:::{important} - Running as root If {{es}} was installed using the deb or rpm package, then run /usr/share/elasticsearch/bin/elasticsearch-plugin as root so it can write to the appropriate files on disk. Otherwise, run bin/elasticsearch-plugin as the user that owns all of the {{es}} files. :::

Refer to the following pages:

Managing plugins for {{eck}} [managing-plugins-for-eck]

{applies_to}

    eck: ga

On {{eck}}, {{es}} runs in Kubernetes pods. Plugins must be on disk before the main {{es}} container starts. The two supported approaches are:

Using a custom container image: You build a custom image from the official Elastic image with the required plugins pre-installed. This option is reproducible, works without internet access at runtime, and starts quickly, but requires a container registry and a new image for each {{es}} version upgrade.
Using init containers: You use an init container to run elasticsearch-plugin install before the main {{es}} container starts. This option is easier to get started with, but requires pod internet access and repeats the download on each new node.

:::{note} You can inject configuration files, such as synonym dictionaries, SAML metadata, or TLS certificates by mounting them with ConfigMaps or Secrets. However, mounting plugin files into a pod does not run elasticsearch-plugin install, so {{es}} will not load them at startup. Instead, to install plugins, use a custom container image or init container. :::