No way to link back to original indexed file?

Elastic Stack Kibana
#1

Hi I am wondering if I have chosen the wrong tool for my needs. My original goal was to index a folder of 20 GB of files, around 65,000 files. In the search results I would like to link to the found fie, so the user can see the original.

Unless I am very misguided, it appears that Kibana can't do this.

I have indexed the material, created dashboards, I can see the path to the file, but Kibana cannot make this into a functional link. Using URL transformation, the link is clickable, but formatted incorrectly. Am I missing something obvious? Is there a way to extract the file path so I can use my own web server to link these files? Would I have been better off with Spotlight?

#2

Welcome to our community! :smiley:

Can you share what you have configured and why it doesn't work?

#3

Thank you! :slight_smile:

I will preface this by saying this is my first time configuring this. Please excuse my questions & vocabulary as I am still learning.

I have Elastic Search set up and functioning in a Linux environment. I have about 20 GB of local files, stored on the same server. I have Kibana installed and working. I have not configured any security for Elastic of Kibana. I have Metricbeat, Filebeat, and FSCrawler configured and working. I have configured FSCrawler to crawl my data once (it never changes) and build an index. In Kibana, I created an Index Pattern for this data and I can see this under Index Management.

I can now see the data under Kibana Discover, along with all the meta fields. And within those is one called "content" which contains the text of every crawled file. Also present are fields called file.url and path.real, which both point to the file's stored location on the local volume.

I used Index Patterns to edit the file.url and path.real fields, setting Type to "Link" and URL Template to query:(language:kuery,query:'file.url:{{value}}') for example.

This turns the fields into clickable links, but the links are formatted with text that looks like this:
/app/query:language:kuery,query:'file.url:file...

I now understand that due to browser security, local files are not accessible.

My real question: I am trying to build a simple search interface that will allow the user to open the original file after browsing search results. Is Elastic Search with Kibana a good fit for this? I am starting to think I made a mistake.

#4

Can you post screenshots of what you have configured please?

Well, you cannot open local files through Kibana. But if your browser can do it then you should be able to set the link to file:/// and then go from there. Posting more of what you have would be helpful in sorting it out.

1 Like
#5

Thank you so much for the response.

I have tried to create the file link. This is exactly where I got confused. As an example, if the visible text of the link is:

file:///home/stuff/stuffData/AP2/Active Projects TRANSMITTAL to Cx.DOT

The link will actually goes to:

http://server.place.com:5601/app/query:(language:kuery,query:'file.url:file%3A%2F%2F%2Fhome%2Fstuff%2FstuffData%2FAP2%2FActive%20Projects%20TRANSMITTAL%20to%20Cx.DOT')

However, something about your response made me finally understand how I am probably supposed to be using this: All my "stuff" should be already hosted, on another web server, already linkable. Then perhaps FScrawler or a web crawler would index the files, and the URL transformation I am seeing would be a working address, instead of pointing toward .../app/query...

Do you think that would work better?