Contributing to Kibana

We understand that you may not have days at a time to work on Kibana. We ask that you read our contributing guidelines carefully so that you spend less time, overall, struggling to push your PR through our code review processes.

At the same time, reading the contributing guidelines will give you a better idea of how to post meaningful issues that will be more easily be parsed, considered, and resolved. A big win for everyone involved! 🎉

Effective issue reporting in Kibana

Voicing the importance of an issue

We seriously appreciate thoughtful comments. If an issue is important to you, add a comment with a solid write up of your use case and explain why it's so important. Please avoid posting comments comprised solely of a thumbs up emoji 👍.

Granted that you share your thoughts, we might even be able to come up with creative solutions to your specific problem. If everything you'd like to say has already been brought up but you'd still like to add a token of support, feel free to add a 👍 thumbs up reaction on the issue itself and on the comment which best summarizes your thoughts.

"My issue isn't getting enough attention"

First of all, sorry about that! We want you to have a great time with Kibana.

There's hundreds of open issues and prioritizing what to work on is an important aspect of our daily jobs. We prioritize issues according to impact and difficulty, so some issues can be neglected while we work on more pressing issues.

Feel free to bump your issues if you think they've been neglected for a prolonged period.

"I want to help!"

Now we're talking. If you have a bug fix or new feature that you would like to contribute to Kibana, please find or open an issue about it before you start working on it. Talk about what you would like to do. It may be that somebody is already working on it, or that there are particular issues that you should know about before implementing the change.

We enjoy working with contributors to get their code accepted. There are many approaches to fixing a problem and it is important to find the best approach before writing too much code.

How We Use Git and GitHub

Forking

We follow the GitHub forking model for collaborating on Kibana code. This model assumes that you have a remote called upstream which points to the official Kibana repo, which we'll refer to in later code snippets.

Branching

All work on the next major release goes into master.
Past major release branches are named {majorVersion}.x. They contain work that will go into the next minor release. For example, if the next minor release is 5.2.0, work for it should go into the 5.x branch.
Past minor release branches are named {majorVersion}.{minorVersion}. They contain work that will go into the next patch release. For example, if the next patch release is 5.3.1, work for it should go into the 5.3 branch.
All work is done on feature branches and merged into one of these branches.
Where appropriate, we'll backport changes into older release branches.

Commits and Merging

Feel free to make as many commits as you want, while working on a branch.
When submitting a PR for review, please perform an interactive rebase to present a logical history that's easy for the reviewers to follow.
Please use your commit messages to include helpful information on your changes, e.g. changes to APIs, UX changes, bugs fixed, and an explanation of why you made the changes that you did.
Resolve merge conflicts by rebasing the target branch over your feature branch, and force-pushing (see below for instructions).
When merging, we'll squash your commits into a single commit.

Rebasing and fixing merge conflicts

Rebasing can be tricky, and fixing merge conflicts can be even trickier because it involves force pushing. This is all compounded by the fact that attempting to push a rebased branch remotely will be rejected by git, and you'll be prompted to do a pull, which is not at all what you should do (this will really mess up your branch's history).

Here's how you should rebase master onto your branch, and how to fix merge conflicts when they arise.

First, make sure master is up-to-date.

git checkout master
git fetch upstream
git rebase upstream/master

Then, check out your branch and rebase master on top of it, which will apply all of the new commits on master to your branch, and then apply all of your branch's new commits after that.

git checkout name-of-your-branch
git rebase master

You want to make sure there are no merge conflicts. If there are merge conflicts, git will pause the rebase and allow you to fix the conflicts before continuing.

You can use git status to see which files contain conflicts. They'll be the ones that aren't staged for commit. Open those files, and look for where git has marked the conflicts. Resolve the conflicts so that the changes you want to make to the code have been incorporated in a way that doesn't destroy work that's been done in master. Refer to master's commit history on GitHub if you need to gain a better understanding of how code is conflicting and how best to resolve it.

Once you've resolved all of the merge conflicts, use git add -A to stage them to be committed, and then use git rebase --continue to tell git to continue the rebase.

When the rebase has completed, you will need to force push your branch because the history is now completely different than what's on the remote. This is potentially dangerous because it will completely overwrite what you have on the remote, so you need to be sure that you haven't lost any work when resolving merge conflicts. (If there weren't any merge conflicts, then you can force push without having to worry about this.)

git push origin name-of-your-branch --force

This will overwrite the remote branch with what you have locally. You're done!

Note that you should not run git pull, for example in response to a push rejection like this:

! [rejected] name-of-your-branch -> name-of-your-branch (non-fast-forward)
error: failed to push some refs to 'https://github.com/YourGitHubHandle/kibana.git'
hint: Updates were rejected because the tip of your current branch is behind
hint: its remote counterpart. Integrate the remote changes (e.g.
hint: 'git pull ...') before pushing again.
hint: See the 'Note about fast-forwards' in 'git push --help' for details.

Assuming you've successfully rebased and you're happy with the code, you should force push instead.

What Goes Into a Pull Request

Please include an explanation of your changes in your PR description.
Links to relevant issues, external resources, or related PRs are very important and useful.
Please update any tests that pertain to your code, and add new tests where appropriate.
See Submitting a Pull Request for more info.

Contributing Code

These guidelines will help you get your Pull Request into shape so that a code review can start as soon as possible.

Setting Up Your Development Environment

Fork, then clone the kibana repo and change directory into it

git clone https://github.com/[YOUR_USERNAME]/kibana.git kibana
cd kibana

Install the version of Node.js listed in the .node-version file. This can be automated with tools such as nvm, nvm-windows or avn. As we also include a .nvmrc file you can switch to the correct version when using nvm by running:

nvm use

Install the latest version of yarn.

Bootstrap Kibana and install all the dependencies

yarn kbn bootstrap

Node.js native modules could be in use and node-gyp is the tool used to build them. There are tools you need to install per platform and python versions you need to be using. Please see https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp#installation and follow the guide according your platform.

(You can also run yarn kbn to see the other available commands. For more info about this tool, see https://github.com/elastic/kibana/tree/master/packages/kbn-pm.)

When switching branches which use different versions of npm packages you may need to run;

yarn kbn clean

If you have failures during yarn kbn bootstrap you may have some corrupted packages in your yarn cache which you can clean with;

yarn cache clean

Increase node.js heap size

Kibana is a big project and for some commands it can happen that the process hits the default heap limit and crashes with an out-of-memory error. If you run into this problem, you can increase maximum heap size by setting the --max_old_space_size option on the command line. To set the limit for all commands, simply add the following line to your shell config: export NODE_OPTIONS="--max_old_space_size=2048".

Running Elasticsearch Locally

There are a few options when it comes to running Elasticsearch locally:

Nightly snapshot (recommended)

These snapshots are built on a nightly basis which expire after a couple weeks. If running from an old, untracted branch this snapshot might not exist. In which case you might need to run from source or an archive.

yarn es snapshot

Keeping data between snapshots

If you want to keep the data inside your Elasticsearch between usages of this command, you should use the following command, to keep your data folder outside the downloaded snapshot folder:

yarn es snapshot -E path.data=../data

The same parameter can be used with the source and archive command shown in the following paragraphs.

Source

By default, it will reference an elasticsearch checkout which is a sibling to the Kibana directory named elasticsearch. If you wish to use a checkout in another location you can provide that by supplying --source-path

yarn es source

Running Elasticsearch Remotely

You can save some system resources, and the effort of generating sample data, if you have a remote Elasticsearch cluster to connect to. (Elasticians: you do! Check with your team about where to find credentials)

You'll need to create a kibana.dev.yml and add the following to it:

elasticsearch.hosts:
  - {{ url }}
elasticsearch.username: {{ username }}
elasticsearch.password: {{ password }}
elasticsearch.ssl.verificationMode: none

If many other users will be interacting with your remote cluster, you'll want to add the following to avoid causing conflicts:

kibana.index: '.{YourGitHubHandle}-kibana'
xpack.task_manager.index: '.{YourGitHubHandle}-task-manager-kibana'

Running remote clusters

Setup remote clusters for cross cluster search (CCS) and cross cluster replication (CCR).

Start your primary cluster by running:

yarn es snapshot -E path.data=../data_prod1

Start your remote cluster by running:

yarn es snapshot -E transport.port=9500 -E http.port=9201 -E path.data=../data_prod2

Once both clusters are running, start kibana. Kibana will connect to the primary cluster.

Setup the remote cluster in Kibana from either Management -> Elasticsearch -> Remote Clusters UI or by running the following script in Console.

PUT _cluster/settings
{
  "persistent": {
    "cluster": {
      "remote": {
        "cluster_one": {
          "seeds": [
            "localhost:9500"
          ]
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Follow the cross-cluster search instructions for setting up index patterns to search across clusters.

Running Kibana

Change to your local Kibana directory. Start the development server.

yarn start

On Windows, you'll need to use Git Bash, Cygwin, or a similar shell that exposes the sh command. And to successfully build you'll need Cygwin optional packages zip, tar, and shasum.

Now you can point your web browser to http://localhost:5601 and start using Kibana! When running yarn start, Kibana will also log that it is listening on port 5603 due to the base path proxy, but you should still access Kibana on port 5601.

By default, you can log in with username elastic and password changeme. See the --help options on yarn es <command> if you'd like to configure a different password.

Running Kibana in Open-Source mode

If you're looking to only work with the open-source software, supply the license type to yarn es:

yarn es snapshot --license oss

And start Kibana with only open-source code:

yarn start --oss

Unsupported URL Type

If you're installing dependencies and seeing an error that looks something like

Unsupported URL Type: link:packages/eslint-config-kibana

you're likely running npm. To install dependencies in Kibana you need to run yarn kbn bootstrap. For more info, see Setting Up Your Development Environment above.

Customizing `config/kibana.dev.yml`

The config/kibana.yml file stores user configuration directives. Since this file is checked into source control, however, developer preferences can't be saved without the risk of accidentally committing the modified version. To make customizing configuration easier during development, the Kibana CLI will look for a config/kibana.dev.yml file if run with the --dev flag. This file behaves just like the non-dev version and accepts any of the standard settings.

Potential Optimization Pitfalls

Webpack is trying to include a file in the bundle that I deleted and is now complaining about it is missing
A module id that used to resolve to a single file now resolves to a directory, but webpack isn't adapting
(if you discover other scenarios, please send a PR!)

Setting Up SSL

Kibana includes self-signed certificates that can be used for development purposes in the browser and for communicating with Elasticsearch: yarn start --ssl & yarn es snapshot --ssl.

Linting

A note about linting: We use eslint to check that the styleguide is being followed. It runs in a pre-commit hook and as a part of the tests, but most contributors integrate it with their code editors for real-time feedback.

Here are some hints for getting eslint setup in your favorite editor:

Editor	Plugin
Sublime	SublimeLinter-eslint
Atom	linter-eslint
VSCode	ESLint
IntelliJ	Settings » Languages & Frameworks » JavaScript » Code Quality Tools » ESLint
`vi`	scrooloose/syntastic

Another tool we use for enforcing consistent coding style is EditorConfig, which can be set up by installing a plugin in your editor that dynamically updates its configuration. Take a look at the EditorConfig site to find a plugin for your editor, and browse our .editorconfig file to see what config rules we set up.

Setup Guide for VS Code Users

Note that for VSCode, to enable "live" linting of TypeScript (and other) file types, you will need to modify your local settings, as shown below. The default for the ESLint extension is to only lint JavaScript file types.

"eslint.validate": [
  "javascript",
  "javascriptreact",
  { "language": "typescript", "autoFix": true },
  { "language": "typescriptreact", "autoFix": true }
]

eslint can automatically fix trivial lint errors when you save a file by adding this line in your setting.

  "eslint.autoFixOnSave": true,

⚠️ It is not recommended to use the Prettier extension/IDE plugin while maintaining the Kibana project. Formatting and styling roles are set in the multiple .eslintrc.js files across the project and some of them use the NPM version of Prettier. Using the IDE extension might cause conflicts, applying the formatting to too many files that shouldn't be prettier-ized and/or highlighting errors that are actually OK.

Internationalization

All user-facing labels and info texts in Kibana should be internationalized. Please take a look at the readme and the guideline of the i18n package on how to do so.

In order to enable translations in the React parts of the application, the top most component of every ReactDOM.render call should be the Context component from the i18n core service:

const I18nContext = coreStart.i18n.Context;

ReactDOM.render(
  <I18nContext>
      {myComponentTree}
  </I18nContext>,
  container
);

There are a number of tools created to support internationalization in Kibana that would allow one to validate internationalized labels, extract them to a JSON file or integrate translations back to Kibana. To know more, please read corresponding readme file.

Testing and Building

To ensure that your changes will not break other functionality, please run the test suite and build process before submitting your Pull Request.

Before running the tests you will need to install the projects dependencies as described above.

Once that's done, just run:

yarn test && yarn build --skip-os-packages

You can get all build options using the following command:

yarn build --help

macOS users on a machine with a discrete graphics card may see significant speedups (up to 2x) when running tests by changing your terminal emulator's GPU settings. In iTerm2:

Open Preferences (Command + ,)
In the General tab, under the "Magic" section, ensure "GPU rendering" is checked
Open "Advanced GPU Settings..."
Uncheck the "Prefer integrated to discrete GPU" option
Restart iTerm

Debugging Server Code

yarn debug will start the server with Node's inspect flag. Kibana's development mode will start three processes on ports 9229, 9230, and 9231. Chrome's developer tools need to be configured to connect to all three connections. Add localhost:<port> for each Kibana process in Chrome's developer tools connection tab.

Instrumenting with Elastic APM

Kibana ships with the Elastic APM Node.js Agent built-in for debugging purposes.

Its default configuration is meant to be used by core Kibana developers only, but it can easily be re-configured to your needs. In its default configuration it's disabled and will, once enabled, send APM data to a centrally managed Elasticsearch cluster accessible only to Elastic employees.

To change the location where data is sent, use the serverUrl APM config option. To activate the APM agent, use the active APM config option.

All config options can be set either via environment variables, or by creating an appropriate config file under config/apm.dev.js. For more information about configuring the APM agent, please refer to the documentation.

Example config/apm.dev.js file:

module.exports = {
  active: true,
};

Once the agent is active, it will trace all incoming HTTP requests to Kibana, monitor for errors, and collect process-level metrics. The collected data will be sent to the APM Server and is viewable in the APM UI in Kibana.

Unit testing frameworks

Kibana is migrating unit testing from Mocha to Jest. Legacy unit tests still exist in Mocha but all new unit tests should be written in Jest. Mocha tests are contained in __tests__ directories. Whereas Jest tests are stored in the same directory as source code files with the .test.js suffix.

Running specific Kibana tests

The following table outlines possible test file locations and how to invoke them:

Test runner	Test location	Runner command (working directory is kibana root)
Jest	`src/*/.test.js` `src/*/.test.ts`	`yarn test:jest -t regexp [test path]`
Jest (integration)	`/integration_tests//*.test.js`	`yarn test:jest_integration -t regexp [test path]`
Mocha	`src//__tests__//.js` `!src//public/__tests__/.js` `packages/kbn-datemath/test/*/.js` `packages/kbn-dev-utils/src//__tests__//.js` `tasks//__tests__//.js`	`node scripts/mocha --grep=regexp [test path]`
Functional	`test/integration//config.js` `test/functional/**/config.js` `test/accessibility/config.js`	`yarn test:ftr:server --config test/[directory]/config.js` `yarn test:ftr:runner --config test/[directory]/config.js --grep=regexp`
Karma	`src/*/public/__tests__/.js`	`yarn test:karma:debug`

For X-Pack tests located in x-pack/ see X-Pack Testing

Test runner arguments:

Where applicable, the optional arguments -t=regexp or --grep=regexp will only run tests or test suites whose descriptions matches the regular expression.
[test path] is the relative path to the test file.

Examples:

Run the entire elasticsearch_service test suite:

yarn test:jest src/core/server/elasticsearch/elasticsearch_service.test.ts

Run the jest test case whose description matches stops both admin and data clients:

yarn test:jest -t 'stops both admin and data clients' src/core/server/elasticsearch/elasticsearch_service.test.ts

Run the api integration test case whose description matches the given string:

yarn test:ftr:server --config test/api_integration/config.js
yarn test:ftr:runner --config test/api_integration/config.js --grep='should return 404 if id does not match any sample data sets'

Debugging Unit Tests

The standard yarn test task runs several sub tasks and can take several minutes to complete, making debugging failures pretty painful. In order to ease the pain specialized tasks provide alternate methods for running the tests.

You could also add the --debug option so that node is run using the --debug-brk flag. You'll need to connect a remote debugger such as node-inspector to proceed in this mode.

node scripts/mocha --debug <file>

With yarn test:karma, you can run only the browser tests. Coverage reports are available for browser tests by running yarn test:coverage. You can find the results under the coverage/ directory that will be created upon completion.

yarn test:karma

Using yarn test:karma:debug initializes an environment for debugging the browser tests. Includes an dedicated instance of the kibana server for building the test bundle, and a karma server. When running this task the build is optimized for the first time and then a karma-owned instance of the browser is opened. Click the "debug" button to open a new tab that executes the unit tests.

yarn test:karma:debug

In the screenshot below, you'll notice the URL is localhost:9876/debug.html. You can append a grep query parameter to this URL and set it to a string value which will be used to exclude tests which don't match. For example, if you changed the URL to localhost:9876/debug.html?query=my test and then refreshed the browser, you'd only see tests run which contain "my test" in the test description.

Unit Testing Plugins

This should work super if you're using the Kibana plugin generator. If you're not using the generator, well, you're on your own. We suggest you look at how the generator works.

To run the tests for just your particular plugin run the following command from your plugin:

yarn test:mocha
yarn test:karma:debug # remove the debug flag to run them once and close

Automated Accessibility Testing

To run the tests locally:

In one terminal window run node scripts/functional_tests_server --config test/accessibility/config.ts
In another terminal window run node scripts/functional_test_runner.js --config test/accessibility/config.ts

To run the x-pack tests, swap the config file out for x-pack/test/accessibility/config.ts.

After the server is up, you can go to this instance of Kibana at localhost:5620.

The testing is done using axe. The same thing that runs in CI, can be run locally using their browser plugins:

Chrome
Firefox

Cross-browser Compatibility

Testing Compatibility Locally

Testing IE on OS X

Download VMWare Fusion.
Download IE virtual machines for VMWare.
Open VMWare and go to Window > Virtual Machine Library. Unzip the virtual machine and drag the .vmx file into your Virtual Machine Library.
Right-click on the virtual machine you just added to your library and select "Snapshots...", and then click the "Take" button in the modal that opens. You can roll back to this snapshot when the VM expires in 90 days.
In System Preferences > Sharing, change your computer name to be something simple, e.g. "computer".
Run Kibana with yarn start --host=computer.local (substituting your computer name).
Now you can run your VM, open the browser, and navigate to http://computer.local:5601 to test Kibana.
Alternatively you can use browserstack

Running Browser Automation Tests

Read about the FunctionalTestRunner to learn more about how you can run and develop functional tests for Kibana core and plugins.

You can also look into the Scripts README.md to learn more about using the node scripts we provide for building Kibana, running integration tests, and starting up Kibana and Elasticsearch while you develop.

Building OS packages

Packages are built using fpm, dpkg, and rpm. Package building has only been tested on Linux and is not supported on any other platform.

apt-get install ruby-dev rpm
gem install fpm -v 1.5.0
yarn build --skip-archives

To specify a package to build you can add rpm or deb as an argument.

yarn build --rpm

Distributable packages can be found in target/ after the build completes.

Writing documentation

Kibana documentation is written in asciidoc format in the docs/ directory.

To build the docs, you must clone the elastic/docs repo as a sibling of your kibana repo. Follow the instructions in that project's README for getting the docs tooling set up.

To build the docs and open them in your browser:

node scripts/docs.js --open

Release Notes Process

Part of this process only applies to maintainers, since it requires access to GitHub labels.

Kibana publishes major, minor and patch releases periodically through the year. During this process we run a script against this repo to collect the applicable PRs against that release and generate Release Notes. To include your change in the Release Notes:

In the title, summarize what the PR accomplishes in language that is meaningful to the user. In general, use present tense (for example, Adds, Fixes) in sentence case.
Label the PR with the targeted version (ex: v7.3.0).
Label the PR with the appropriate GitHub labels:
- For a new feature or functionality, use release_note:enhancement.
- For an external-facing fix, use release_note:fix. Exception: docs, build, and test fixes do not go in the Release Notes. Neither fixes for issues that were only on master and never have been released.
- For a deprecated feature, use release_note:deprecation.
- For a breaking change, use release_note:breaking.
- To NOT include your changes in the Release Notes, please use release_note:skip.

We also produce a blog post that details more important breaking API changes every minor and major release. If the PR includes a breaking API change, apply the label release_note:dev_docs. Additionally add a brief summary of the break at the bottom of the PR using the format below:

# Dev Docs

## Name the feature with the break (ex: Visualize Loader)

Summary of the change. Anything Under `#Dev Docs` will be used in the blog.

Signing the contributor license agreement

Please make sure you have signed the Contributor License Agreement. We are not asking you to assign copyright to us, but to give us the right to distribute your code without restriction. We ask this of all contributors in order to assure our users of the origin and continuing existence of the code. You only need to sign the CLA once.

Submitting a Pull Request

Push your local changes to your forked copy of the repository and submit a Pull Request. In the Pull Request, describe what your changes do and mention the number of the issue where discussion has taken place, e.g., “Closes #123″.

Always submit your pull against master unless the bug is only present in an older version. If the bug affects both master and another branch say so in your pull.

Then sit back and wait. There will probably be discussion about the Pull Request and, if any changes are needed, we'll work with you to get your Pull Request merged into Kibana.

Code Reviewing

After a pull is submitted, it needs to get to review. If you have commit permission on the Kibana repo you will probably perform these steps while submitting your Pull Request. If not, a member of the Elastic organization will do them for you, though you can help by suggesting a reviewer for your changes if you've interacted with someone while working on the issue.

Getting to the Code Review Stage

Assign the review label. This signals to the team that someone needs to give this attention.
Do not assign a version label. Someone from Elastic staff will assign a version label, if necessary, when your Pull Request is ready to be merged.
Find someone to review your pull. Don't just pick any yahoo, pick the right person. The right person might be the original reporter of the issue, but it might also be the person most familiar with the code you've changed. If neither of those things apply, or your change is small in scope, try to find someone on the Kibana team without a ton of existing reviews on their plate. As a rule, most pulls will require 2 reviewers, but the first reviewer will pick the 2nd.

Reviewing Pull Requests

So, you've been assigned a pull to review. Check out our pull request review guidelines for our general philosophy for pull request reviewers.

Thank you so much for reading our guidelines! 🎉

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