Introducing Elasticsearch Plugins and Kibana One-click Install

Among many great things our customers like when using Scalingo is the ability to easily deploy many different types of database: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, InfluxDB (haven't you heard about it? Well, nobody did... it will soon be publicly announced) and Elasticsearch. On our way to keep helping you building great products, we developed an easy way to install Elasticsearch plugins using the database dashboard and Kibana with a one-click deploy application.

What are the Elasticsearch plugins for?

The Elasticsearch database is a famous, distributed, full-text search engine. It let you search inside any text very quickly and efficiently. In order to enhance its basic features, Elasticsearch provides a plugin system to add mapping types, custom analyzers, etc.

The Elasticsearch database is available on Scalingo for a long time now. The latest available version being 2.3.4. Just like any other database, we back it up daily starting from the first paying plan. From now on, you will be able to install Elasticsearch plugins from the database dashboard: follow the guide.

Available plugins on Scalingo

By default, you can install three of the official plugins on Scalingo:

• Mapper Attachments: The mapper attachments plugin lets Elasticsearch index file attachments in common formats (such as PPT, XLS, PDF) using the Apache text extraction library Tika. In practice, the plugin adds the attachment type when mapping properties so that documents can be populated with file attachment contents (encoded as base64).
• Mapper Size: The mapper-size plugin provides the _size meta field which, when enabled, indexes the size in bytes of the original _source field.
• Mapper Murmur3: The mapper-murmur3 plugin provides the ability to compute hash of field values at index-time and store them in the index. This can sometimes be helpful when running cardinality aggregations on high-cardinality and large string fields.

Heard of a great plugin you would like to use? Contact our support to make it available.

How to

In order to install a plugin: * Step 1: select the ES add-on in your dashboard and click "Dashboard".

• Step 2: in the database dashboard, click the advanced tab. Voilà, here is the list of plugins you can install.

• Step 3: there's no step 3.

Deploying Kibana on Scalingo

Kibana is an open source web interface that provides realtime analytics visualization of your data stored in your Elasticsearch database. We developed a one-click button to deploy Kibana on Scalingo. You can find an example below of what kind of graphic representation you can build with Kibana:

Just click on the following button and the wonderful world of complex charts will be available to you!

You can find the source of this one-click button in our dedicated github project. It's based on a Kibana buildpack refreshed by our mighty Soulou.

The official user guide will help use Kibana.