Kibana API reference documentation

Documentation about our OpenAPI bundling workflow and configuration. See Kibana's hosted stateful and serverless docs.

Workflow

The final goal of this workflow is to produce an OpenAPI bundle containing all Kibana's public APIs.

Step 0

OAS from Kibana's APIs are continuously extracted and captured in bundle.json and bundle.serverless.json as fully formed OAS documentation. See node scripts/capture_oas_snapshot --help for more info.

These bundles form the basis of our OpenAPI bundles to which we append and layer extra information before publishing.

Step 1

Append pre-existing bundles not extracted from code using kbn-openapi-bundler to produce the final resulting bundles.

To add more files into the final bundle, edit the appropriate oas_docs/scripts/merge*.js files.

Step 2

Apply any final overalys to the document that might include examples or final tweaks (see the "Scripts" section for more details).

Scripts

The oas_docs/scripts folder contains scripts that point to the source domain-specific OpenAPI bundles and specify additional parameters for producing the final output bundle. Currently, there are the following scripts:

merge_ess_oas.js script produces production an output bundle for ESS
merge_serverless_oas.js script produces production an output bundle for Serverless

Output Kibana OpenAPI bundles

The oas_docs/output folder contains the final resulting Kibana OpenAPI bundles

kibana.yaml production ready ESS OpenAPI bundle
kibana.serverless.yaml production ready Serverless OpenAPI bundle

Bundling commands

Besides the scripts in the oas_docs/scripts folder, there is an oas_docs/makefile to simplify the workflow. Use make help to see available commands.

Dashboards & Visualizations — temporary external hosting (tech preview)

⚠️ Temporary setup — see #266195 for the GA revert checklist.

The Dashboards and Visualizations APIs are in technical preview. While in tech preview they are hosted externally at https://elastic.github.io/as-code-docs/ because Bump.sh cannot render their schemas at this time.

How the two pipelines differ

	Bump.sh pipeline (`make api-docs`)	External pipeline (`make api-docs-overlay-external`)
Dashboards & Visualizations content	Redirect-only shells (links to external docs)	Full schemas
Output	`output/kibana.yaml` / `output/kibana.serverless.yaml`	`output/kibana.external.yaml`
Run by CI	✅	❌ manual only

Keeping external docs in sync

Every time the Dashboards or Visualizations API schemas change, the external docs must be manually regenerated and pushed. Otherwise the externally hosted docs will silently drift from the actual API.

Runbook:

bash

cd oas_docs
make api-docs-overlay-external   # regenerates output/kibana.external.yaml
# copy output/kibana.external.yaml to the elastic/as-code-docs repo and publish