Building a Kibana distributable - Kibana

On the course of that tutorial it will be possible to learn more about how we can create a Kibana distributable as well as handle its different main configurations.

At any given point, you can get CLI help running the following command:

bash

yarn build --help

Prerequisites

For the basic steps of the build we only require you to use one of the following operating systems:

Linux
macOS

However if as part of the build you also want to generate Linux installation packages (deb, rpm) or Docker images there are other dependencies to have in mind as those installation packages and Docker images generation are run using fpm, dpkg, rpm, and Docker.

For Linux Installation Packages Build

Please make sure you have the following dependencies installed:

Install FPM dependencies

On OSX/macOS:

bash

brew install gnu-tar rpm

On Red Hat systems (Fedora 22 or older, CentOS, etc):

bash

yum install ruby-devel gcc make rpm-build rubygems

On Fedora 23 or newer:

bash

dnf install ruby-devel gcc make rpm-build libffi-devel

On Oracle Linux 7.x systems:

bash

yum-config-manager --enable ol7_optional_latest
yum install ruby-devel gcc make rpm-build rubygems

On Debian-derived systems (Debian, Ubuntu, etc):

bash

apt-get install ruby ruby-dev rubygems build-essential

Install FPM

Finally install fpm with the gem tool with:

bash

gem install fpm -v 1.5.0

For Docker Images Build

For Docker, the installation instructions can be found at Install Docker Engine.

Create a Kibana distributable

In a great majority of the use cases where we need to build a Kibana distributable, we just need the archives containing the node executable and the bundled code of the application.

By doing that Linux installation packages and Docker images will be excluded and as a result, the build will be quicker.

We can do it by simply running:

bash

yarn build --skip-os-packages

Note that we used --skip-os-packages which will skip the OS packages build.

In case you are testing something and running that same command a couple of times, --skip-node-download can be used to speed up the process by a little.

At the end of the process a Kibana distributable was created in a target folder created relative to your repository checkout. The folder will look like the following:

Controlling the log levels

By default, when building the distributable, the debug log level will be used across all the steps. That default setting should give us a good amount of information about the tasks being done.

To turn it off you can run the build along --no-debug flag. At that point that information will no longer be printed out.

For a longer and verbose logging than debug there is other option that can be passed along the build command which is --verbose.

Create a Kibana distributable with Linux installation packages and Docker images

If you comply with every prerequisite and dependency listed above, then there is also the option to create a Kibana distributable along with Linux installation packages like rpm and deb or Docker images.

To achieve it, you can run:

bash

yarn build

At the end you will get the Kibana distributable archives plus the Docker images and both an rpm and a deb package.

To specify just a single installation package or Docker images to build instead of all of them you can add rpm, deb or docker-images as an argument:

bash

yarn build --deb
yarn build --rpm
yarn build --docker-images

Again the distributable contents resulting from running the build command can be found in a target folder created relative to the repository after the build completes. It will look something like: