how to automate the configuration of an index pattern in kibana

Question

Is it possible to automate the configuration of an index pattern in kibana? Either via some settings file or perhaps a rest api. After installation it's possible to do it manually.

Answer 1

Kibana 5.x exposes such an API to manage index patterns.

To create index pattern one can issue below command to kibana access url (just edit the kibana endpoint, index-name and timestamp variables to match your needs):

curl <kibana-endpoint>/es_admin/.kibana/index-pattern/<index-name>/_create\
    -H "Content-Type: application/json"\
    -H "Accept: application/json, text/plain, */*"\
    -H "kbn-xsrf: <index-name>"\
    --data-binary '{"title":"${<index-name>}","timeFieldName":"<timestamp-field>"}' -w "\n"

For instance if kibana is under localhost:5601 and index-name is alert (alert_time is timestamp field) then command:

curl localhost:5601/es_admin/.kibana/index-pattern/alert/_create\ 
    -H "Content-Type: application/json"\
    -H "Accept: application/json, text/plain, */*"\
    -H "kbn-xsrf: alert"\
    --data-binary '{"title":"alert","timeFieldName":"alert_time"}'  -w "\n"

Similarly, one can define default index pattern using below API for the example:

curl localhost:5601/api/kibana/settings/defaultIndex\
    -H "Content-Type: application/json"\
    -H "Accept: application/json, text/plain, */*"\
    -H "kbn-xsrf: alert"\
    -H "Connection: keep-alive"\
    --data-binary "{\"value\":\"alert\"}" -w "\n"

Answer 2

At present this is not possible. There is an issue at the Kibana github repo which schedules an Index pattern creation API for the 4.5.0 release. https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues/3709