Installing plugins in ElasticSearch

One of the main features of ElasticSearch is the possibility to extend it with plugins. Plugins extend ElasticSearch features and functionality in several ways. There are two kinds of plugins:

• Site plugins: These are used to serve static content at their entry points. They are mainly used to create a management application for the monitoring and administration of a cluster. The most common site plugins are:

  • ElasticSearch head (http://mobz.github.io/elasticsearch-head/)

  • Elastic HQ (http://www.elastichq.org/)

  • Bigdesk (http://bigdesk.org)

• Native plugins: These are the .jar files that contain the application code. They are used for:

  • Rivers (plugins that allow you to import data from DBMS or other sources)

  • Scripting Language Engines (JavaScript, Python, Scala, and Ruby)

  • Custom analyzers, tokenizers, and scoring

  • REST entry points

  • Supporting new protocols (Thrift, memcache, and so on)

  • Supporting new storages (Hadoop)

Getting ready

You need a working ElasticSearch server...