Working with plugins

macOS Gatekeeper warnings

Apple’s rollout of stricter notarization requirements affected the notarization of the 9.0.0-beta1 Logstash artifacts. If macOS Catalina displays a dialog when you first run Logstash, you need to take an action to allow it to run. To prevent Gatekeeper checks on the Logstash files, run the following command on the downloaded .tar.gz archive or the directory to which was extracted:

xattr -d -r com.apple.quarantine <archive-or-directory>

For example, if the .tar.gz file was extracted to the default logstash-9.0.0-beta1 directory, the command is:

xattr -d -r com.apple.quarantine logstash-9.0.0-beta1

Alternatively, you can add a security override if a Gatekeeper popup appears by following the instructions in the How to open an app that hasn’t been notarized or is from an unidentified developer section of Safely open apps on your Mac.

Logstash has a rich collection of input, filter, codec, and output plugins. Check out the Elastic Support Matrix to see which plugins are supported at various levels.

Plugins are available in self-contained packages called gems and hosted on RubyGems.org. Use the plugin manager script--bin/logstash-plugin--to manage plugins:

Listing plugins
Adding plugins to your deployment
Updating plugins
Removing plugins
Advanced: Adding a locally built plugin
Advanced: Using --path.plugins

No internet connection?

If you don’t have an internet connection, check out Offline Plugin Management for information on building, installing, and updating offline plugin packs.

Proxy configuration

Most plugin manager commands require access to the internet to reach RubyGems.org. If your organization is behind a firewall, you can set these environments variables to configure Logstash to use your proxy.

		export http_proxy=http://localhost:3128
export https_proxy=http://localhost:3128

Listing plugins

Logstash release packages bundle common plugins. To list the plugins currently available in your deployment:

		bin/logstash-plugin list 1
bin/logstash-plugin list --verbose 2
bin/logstash-plugin list '*namefragment*' 3
bin/logstash-plugin list --group output 4

	

Lists all installed plugins
Lists installed plugins with version information
Lists all installed plugins containing a namefragment
Lists all installed plugins for a particular group (input, filter, codec, output)

Adding plugins to your deployment

When you have access to internet, you can retrieve plugins hosted on the RubyGems.orgpublic repository and install them on top of your Logstash installation.

bin/logstash-plugin install logstash-input-github

After a plugin is successfully installed, you can use it in your configuration file.

Updating plugins

Plugins have their own release cycles and are often released independently of Logstash’s core release cycle. Using the update subcommand you can get the latest version of the plugin.

		bin/logstash-plugin update 1
bin/logstash-plugin update logstash-input-github 2

updates all installed plugins
updates only the plugin you specify

Major version plugin updates

To avoid introducing breaking changes, the plugin manager updates only plugins for which newer minor or patch versions exist by default. If you wish to also include breaking changes, specify --level=major.

		bin/logstash-plugin update --level=major 1
bin/logstash-plugin update --level=major logstash-input-github 2

updates all installed plugins to latest, including major versions with breaking changes
updates only the plugin you specify to latest, including major versions with breaking changes

Removing plugins

If you need to remove plugins from your Logstash installation:

bin/logstash-plugin remove logstash-input-github

Advanced: Adding a locally built plugin

In some cases, you may want to install plugins which are not yet released and not hosted on RubyGems.org. Logstash provides you the option to install a locally built plugin which is packaged as a ruby gem. Using a file location:

bin/logstash-plugin install /path/to/logstash-output-kafka-1.0.0.gem

Advanced: Using `--path.plugins`

Using the Logstash --path.plugins flag, you can load a plugin source code located on your file system. Typically this is used by developers who are iterating on a custom plugin and want to test it before creating a ruby gem.

The path needs to be in a specific directory hierarchy: PATH/logstash/TYPE/NAME.rb, where TYPE is inputs filters, outputs or codecs and NAME is the name of the plugin.

		# supposing the code is in /opt/shared/lib/logstash/inputs/my-custom-plugin-code.rb
bin/logstash --path.plugins /opt/shared/lib