If you found this article through a search engine, you probably feel the same resentment toward X-Pack that I do. At first I thought X-Pack was a free, handy plugin, so I installed it on both Elasticsearch and Kibana. Then 30 days later a message appeared saying the license had expired and I needed to “renew the license key,” otherwise I couldn’t log into Kibana. Up to that point I still assumed I just needed to register an account to get a new license key. But after browsing the official site for a long time, I couldn’t find any text about licensing, pricing, or purchasing (later I found out it does exist — in tiny print… do you people even want to make money?). In the end I only found the pricing page through a Google search.
If you want to make money, please at least write the pricing page clearly. I honestly can’t tell whether nobody at Elastic is in charge of UX or whether this is a deliberate strategy: let you use it for 30 days before you discover “oh, it costs money.” There is almost no information about payment in the X-Pack docs or on the official site. I asked a few friends and they also only found out after 30 days that it costs money. It feels a bit like being tricked. And paying isn’t even the issue — we’re all willing to support good things (it’s the company’s wallet anyway) — but you can’t find any payment information on the official site at all! I want to spend money and I still have to use Google to find the payment page? What kind of joke is that?
Subscription plans: https://www.elastic.co/subscriptions
As for how much it costs? Don’t ask, you’ll be scared. The site only says: “contact sales.” Usually when you see that sentence, you know what it means… What’s worse, you can’t buy features separately — for example, buying only Auth without the other features. Elastic only offers one payment plan. No money, please leave.
Alright, having read this far, I believe everyone has chosen to remove X-Pack just like I did. A reminder: when removing it, don’t just remove the X-Pack plugin from Elasticsearch — Kibana’s X-Pack has to be removed too. If you see a “too many redirects” error in the browser, that means you forgot to remove Kibana’s X-Pack.
cd /usr/share/elasticsearch/bin/ ./elasticsearch-plugin remove x-pack cd /usr/share/kibana/bin/ ./kibana-plugin remove x-pack
Basically, once you’ve removed it like this, everything is fine. Next you can refer to [Elasticsearch and Kibana user authentication setup] to handle basic user login with HTTP Auth (or pair it with Lua for something more complex).
Update: thanks to a reader’s tip — if you want to apply for a free key for the basic features, go to this page.