Installing plugins in Elasticsearch

One of the main features of Elasticsearch is the possibility to extend it with plugins. Plugins extend Elasticsearch features and functionalities in several ways.

In Elasticsearch 5.x, the plugins are native plugins--they are jars files that contain application code. They are used for:

• ScriptEngine (JavaScript, Python, Scala, and Ruby)

• Custom Analyzers, tokenizers, and scoring

• REST entry points

• Ingestion pipeline stages

• Supporting new storages (Hadoop)

Getting ready

You need a working Elasticsearch installation as we described in the Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe and a prompt/shell to execute commands in Elasticsearch install directory.

How to do it...

Elasticsearch provides a script for automatic download and for installation of plugins in bin/directory called plugin.

The steps required to install a plugin are:

• Call the plugin and install Elasticsearch command with the plugin name reference.

• For installing an administrative interface for Elasticsearch...