kbn-shoehorn
Shoehorn Kibana plugins into your plugins path.
Usage
Install kbn-shoehorn globally and use it to install plugins from the kibana path.
npm install -g kbn-shoehorn
# or with yarn
yarn global add kbn-shoehorn
Simply run kbn-shoehorn from the root of your Kibana path, and follow the prompts.
Specify the plugin inline
You can optionally pass the username/repo as the first argument as well to skip the first question.
kbn-shoehorn snuids/Elastic-5.0-Country-Map-Visualizer
Load plugin from local path
If you need to install a plugin from your machine, you can use the -f flag, passing it the path to the plugin. If you have a zip file, that can be used as well.
kbn-shoehorn -f ~/Downloads/kibana/enhanced_tilemap/
# or from a zip file
kbn-shoehorn -f ~/Downloads/health_metric_vis-5.5.0.zip
Non Interactive Options
If you prefer to script plugin installation, or just not deal with the questions at all, you can can mix the inlining of the username/repo argument with the -y flag, which will assume defaults for all other questions.
kbn-shoehorn snuids/Elastic-5.0-Country-Map-Visualizer -y
By default, this will pull from the master branch of the repo. If you still need to specify a specific branch, you can do so using the --branch option.
kbn-shoehorn snuids/Elastic-5.0-Country-Map-Visualizer -y --branch=v5.1
Why?
Kibana comes package with its own plugin installer, so why shoehorn plugins? The answer can be found simply by looking at the installation instructions on just about every third party Kibana plugin out there. All of them generally ask you to download the plugin from github, or some other repo source, and copy it into the plugins path. Since Kibana expects a plugin's version (or kibana.version) to match Kibana's version down to the patch release, many also ask the user to modify the package.json file to match your version of Kibana.
Kibana's plugin installer requires authors to publish a zip file somewhere for the installer to download and unpack. There's a reason for this, related to build assets, but most plugins don't need this, so it's just extra overhead for authors. And as you can see from their installation steps, they don't bother with this step.
That's a lot of manual steps just to author and to use a plugin. We can do better.
kbn-shoehorn handles all the steps you usually have to do manually, so you can get plugins installed and ready to run with 1 command.
Installing from repo
kbn-shoehorn can use a git repo's username/repo path. It will download the plugin directly from the repo and place it in the Kibana plugins path. See the download-git-repo docs for options other than github.
Versioning
kbn-shoehorn doesn't enforce anything. Instead, it will re-write the version (or kibana.version) in the package.json so it matches Kibana's version. This may not be safe, as the author of the plugin may not have meant for the plugin to work with the version of Kibana you are running. But it's your Kibana, that's for you to decide.
Speed
When you install a plugin using Kibana's built in installer, it will run the optimization step every time. This can be really time consuming when you are trying to install several plugins at once. kbn-shoehorn just copies the plugin and leaves that step for when you start Kibana.
License
MIT © w33ble