Setting Up Kibana on Mac OS X Mavericks

Question

I am trying to learn about the ELK stack (ElasticSearch, Logstash and Kibana). In an effort to get started, I've been running through the "Getting Started" guide found at http://logstash.net/docs/1.4.0/tutorials/getting-started-with-logstash. I've been following these steps on a Mac OS X Mavericks installation. I did do one thing different, though.

After downloading the Logstash and Elasticsearch tarballs, I copied their contents into the following locations:

• Logstash: /Applications/dev/logstash/1.4.0/
• Elasticsearch: /Applications/dev/Elasticsearch/1.1.0

I then start Elasticsearch using the following command from a terminal:

sudo /Applications/dev/Elasticsearch/1.1.0/bin/elasticsearch

I then start a new terminal window. In that new terminal window, I start Logstash using the following command:

sudo /Applications/dev/logstash/1.4.0/bin/logstash -e 'input { stdin { } } output { elasticsearch { host => localhost } } '

Logstash appears to start just fine. If I enter 'you know, for logs' as mentioned in the getting started guide, I can see the results using POSTMAN. However, I'm stuck on Kibana.

I've downloaded Kibana using the following command:

git clone https://github.com/elasticsearch/kibana.git kibana

I've placed the downloaded files into /Applications/dev/kibana/3.0.0. I'm now stuck on how to actually bring Kibana up in a web browser. I know that somehow I need to serve these files. I see server stuff in this sample. However, I'm not sure if

1. There is a recommended web server for Kibana
2. How to setup a a web site on a Mac OS X machine. If I were on Windows, I'd just use IIS and point it at my directory. I'm sure there's something similar on Mac OS X. However, I'm not sure what that is.

Thank you!

Answer 1

While downloading the packages is perfectly fine, your install can be much easier on OS X if you use homebrew. (http://brew.sh)

Simply run:

brew install elasticsearch
brew install logstash

And if you are missing the proper Java JDK or JRE files, homebrew will tell you where to get them from.

If you are running the OS X Server App (see App Store) and have websites service enabled you can also simply drop the Kibana files into the default website directory:

/Library/Server/Web/Data/Sites/Default/

or a subdirectory like:

/Library/Server/Web/Data/Sites/Default/kibana

Hope this helps!