Install Kibana with Debian package

The Debian package for Kibana can be downloaded from our website or from our APT repository. It can be used to install Kibana on any Debian-based system such as Debian and Ubuntu.

This package is free to use under the Elastic license. It contains open source and free commercial features and access to paid commercial features. Start a 30-day trial to try out all of the paid commercial features. See the Subscriptions page for information about Elastic license levels.

The latest stable version of Kibana can be found on the Download Kibana page. Other versions can be found on the Past Releases page.

Import the Elastic PGP key

We sign all of our packages with the Elastic Signing Key (PGP key D88E42B4, available from https://pgp.mit.edu) with fingerprint:

  1. 4609 5ACC 8548 582C 1A26 99A9 D27D 666C D88E 42B4

Download and install the public signing key:

  1. wget -qO - https://artifacts.elastic.co/GPG-KEY-elasticsearch | sudo apt-key add -

Install from the APT repository

You may need to install the apt-transport-https package on Debian before proceeding:

  1. sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https

Save the repository definition to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/elastic-7.x.list:

  1. echo "deb https://artifacts.elastic.co/packages/7.x/apt stable main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/elastic-7.x.list

Do not use add-apt-repository as it will add a deb-src entry as well, but we do not provide a source package. If you have added the deb-src entry, you will see an error like the following:

  1. Unable to find expected entry 'main/source/Sources' in Release file
  2. (Wrong sources.list entry or malformed file)

Delete the deb-src entry from the /etc/apt/sources.list file and the installation should work as expected.

You can install the Kibana Debian package with:

  1. sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install kibana

If two entries exist for the same Kibana repository, you will see an error like this during apt-get update:

  1. Duplicate sources.list entry https://artifacts.elastic.co/packages/7.x/apt/ ...`

Examine /etc/apt/sources.list.d/kibana-7.x.list for the duplicate entry or locate the duplicate entry amongst the files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ and the /etc/apt/sources.list file.

An alternative package, kibana-oss, which contains only features that are available under the Apache 2.0 license is also available. To install it, use the following sources list:

  1. echo "deb https://artifacts.elastic.co/packages/oss-7.x/apt stable main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/elastic-7.x.list

Download and install the Debian package manually

The Debian package for Kibana v7.9.1 can be downloaded from the website and installed as follows:

  1. wget https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/kibana/kibana-7.9.1-amd64.deb
  2. shasum -a 512 kibana-7.9.1-amd64.deb
  3. sudo dpkg -i kibana-7.9.1-amd64.deb

Compare the SHA produced by shasum with the published SHA.

Alternatively, you can download the following package, which contains only features that are available under the Apache 2.0 license: https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/kibana/kibana-oss-7.9.1-amd64.deb

SysV init vs systemd

Kibana is not started automatically after installation. How to start and stop Kibana depends on whether your system uses SysV init or systemd (used by newer distributions). You can tell which is being used by running this command:

  1. ps -p 1

Run Kibana with SysV init

Use the update-rc.d command to configure Kibana to start automatically when the system boots up:

  1. sudo update-rc.d kibana defaults 95 10

You can start and stop Kibana using the service command:

  1. sudo -i service kibana start
  2. sudo -i service kibana stop

If Kibana fails to start for any reason, it will print the reason for failure to STDOUT. Log files can be found in /var/log/kibana/.

Run Kibana with systemd

To configure Kibana to start automatically when the system boots up, run the following commands:

  1. sudo /bin/systemctl daemon-reload
  2. sudo /bin/systemctl enable kibana.service

Kibana can be started and stopped as follows:

  1. sudo systemctl start kibana.service
  2. sudo systemctl stop kibana.service

These commands provide no feedback as to whether Kibana was started successfully or not. Log information can be accessed via journalctl -u kibana.service.

Configure Kibana via the config file

Kibana loads its configuration from the /etc/kibana/kibana.yml file by default. The format of this config file is explained in Configuring Kibana.

Directory layout of Debian package

The Debian package places config files, logs, and the data directory in the appropriate locations for a Debian-based system:

TypeDescriptionDefault LocationSetting

home

Kibana home directory or $KIBANA_HOME

/usr/share/kibana

bin

Binary scripts including kibana to start the Kibana server and kibana-plugin to install plugins

/usr/share/kibana/bin

config

Configuration files including kibana.yml

/etc/kibana

data

The location of the data files written to disk by Kibana and its plugins

/var/lib/kibana

path.data

logs

Logs files location

/var/log/kibana

path.logs

optimize

Transpiled source code. Certain administrative actions (e.g. plugin install) result in the source code being retranspiled on the fly.

/usr/share/kibana/optimize

plugins

Plugin files location. Each plugin will be contained in a subdirectory.

/usr/share/kibana/plugins

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