Creating a plugin

Native plugins allow several aspects of the Elasticsearch server to be extended, but they require a good knowledge of Java.

In this recipe we will see how to set up a working environment to develop native plugins.

Getting ready

You need an up-and-running Elasticsearch installation as we described in the Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe in Chapter 2, Downloading and Setup.

A Maven tool, or an IDE that supports Java programming, such as Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA, is required.

The code to this recipe is available in the chapter17/simple_plugin directory.

How to do it...

Generally, Elasticsearch plugins are developed in Java using the Maven build tool and deployed as a ZIP file.

To create a simple JAR plugin, we will perform the following steps:

1. To correctly build and serve a plugin, some files must be defined:

   • pom.xml is used to define the build configuration for Maven.

   • es-plugin.properties defines the namespace of the plugin class that must be loaded.

   • <name>plugin...