How it works…

The elasticsearch-plugin.bat script is a wrapper for the Elasticsearch plugin manager. This can be used to install or remove a plugin (using the remove options).

There are several ways to install the plugin, for example:

• Passing the URL of the plugin (ZIP archive), as follows:

bin/elasticsearch-plugin install http://mywoderfulserve.com/plugins/awesome-plugin.zip

• Passing the file path of the plugin (ZIP archive), as follows:

bin/elasticsearch-plugin install file:///tmp/awesome-plugin.zip

• Using the install parameter with the GitHub repository of the plugin. The install parameter, which must be given, is formatted in the following way:

<username>/<repo>[/<version>]

During the installation process, Elasticsearch plugin manager is able to do the following:

• Download the plugin
• Create a plugins directory in ES_HOME/plugins, if it's missing
• Optionally, ask if the plugin wants special permission to be executed
• Unzip the plugin content in the plugin directory
• Remove temporary files

The installation process is completely automatic; no further actions are required. The user must only pay attention to the fact that the process ends with an Installed message to be sure that the install process has completed correctly.

Restarting the server is always required to be sure that the plugin is correctly loaded by Elasticsearch.