Logstash: How To Install A Plugin- The Simplest Ways.

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

Logstash, one of the key tools of the ELK stack has been gaining a lot of popularity in the last couple of years. In this tutorial, we’ll go through the two ways to install a plugin on Logstash.

First up, we have to know exactly which plugin we’re going to install. Logstash has got four (04) types of plugins: input plugins, filter plugins, output plugins, and codec plugins. As we talked about in a previous article, there are tons of tons of Logstash plugins. They are written in Ruby and are available either as gem packages on https://rubygems.org/ or on https://github.com/logstash-plugins.

Now that we’ll are sunk into Logstash plugins word, let’s get started.

1- Install a plugin from the internet

The first thing we’re going to do will be to find the installation directory of Logstash on our machine.

Run this command if you’re on Ubuntu:

whereis logstash

Check each one of the paths you’ve got and look for a bin folder for the path we’re looking for. On Ubuntu, the right path is /usr/share/logstash as default path.

So let’s move to that folder.

cd /usr/share/logstash