At various places in this book, we have used different Elasticsearch plugins. You probably remember the additional programming languages used in scripts and support for the attachments described in the Handling files section of Chapter 6, Beyond Full-text Searching. In this section, we will look at how plugins work and how to install them.
Elasticsearch plugins are located in their own subdirectory in the plugins directory. If you have downloaded a new plugin from a site, you can just create a new directory with the plugin name and unpack that plugin archive to this directory. There is also a more convenient way to install plugins: by using the plugin script. We have used it several times in this book, so this is the time to describe this tool.
Elasticsearch has two main types of plugins. These two types can be categorized based on their content: Java plugins and site plugins. Elasticsearch treats the site plugins as a file set that should be served by the built...