kibana

Serving Kibana 4.6 (4.2+) from a subdirectory with nginx

This took me a little while to get right, but the final config is quite simple, so I thought it was worth sharing.

I wanted to serve kibana from a subdirectory, for example mydomain.com/kibana. There are known issues doing this, as of Kibana 4.2:

The problem is that even if you set up an nginx proxy configuration to forward requests from /kibana to the correct place, Kibana serves the app from /app/kibana and tries to load resources via their absolute url, e.g. /bundles/kibana.bundle.js.

The answer is a combination of kibana and nginx config (which isn’t very nice as it means your kibana config is not portable).

In kibana.yml, add the following:

server.basePath: "/kibana"

This means that when kibana generates the urls to load resources, it prefixes them with /kibana. On its own this just breaks kibana! It will try to load e.g. /kibana/bundles/kibana.bundle.js and return a 404. duh.

So, you need to strip out the prefix in your nginx config. Mine looks like this (kibana is running in a docker container on the same network as the nginx container)

location /kibana {
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    rewrite /kibana/(.*)$ /$1 break;
    proxy_pass http://kibana:9292/;
}

Kibana is now available at mydomain.com/kibana – the resulting url will look like mydomain.com/kibana/app/kibana, but you get to keep the initial directory name, meaning it won’t interfere with other things you might be serving from the same host. It would be much neater if the server.basePath setting in kibana was all that was necessary to do this, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be changed any time soon – see discussion at #6665 server.basePath results in 404 (to be fair changing the behaviour would break every existing install using the setting)

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