Pre-configured connectors not easy to configure in kibana.yml

[mikecote]

The xpack.actions.preconfigured kibana.yml configuration currently accepts an array of objects but doesn't make it easy to configure in YML. Using for example a collection, it would be more natural to configure like the following example:

xpack.actions.preconfigured:
  - foo:
    name: Foo
    actionTypeId: .server-log
    config:
      param1: test

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-alerting-services (Team:Alerting Services)

[pmuellr]

Here's what I'm using, which works as far as I can tell:

xpack.actions.preconfigured:
- id: 'slack'
  name: 'slack'
  actionTypeId: '.slack'
  config: 
    webhookUrl: 'https://hooks.slack.com/services/super/secret/here'
- id: 'server-log'
  name: 'server log'
  actionTypeId: '.server-log'
- id: 'maildev auth'
  name: 'email: maildev auth'
  actionTypeId: '.email'
  config:
    from: 'pmuellr@example.com'
    host: 'localhost'
    port: '1025'
  secrets:
    user: 'elastic'
    password: 'changeme'
- id: 'maildev no auth'
  name: 'email: maildev no auth'
  actionTypeId: '.email'
  config:
    from: 'pmuellr@example.com'
    host: 'localhost'
    port: '1025'

I'm not opposed to the form you're suggesting though, which presumably means the keys will be the action ids, though we will have do some filtering to prevent prototype pollution on them (probably?).

[mikecote]

@pmuellr oh, I was thinking only JSON objects could be passed through. Didn't know what you have is what is needed to make arrays work. I will close this issue, thanks for the insight!

[pmuellr]

Re-opening this, as we found that the structure for these doesn't work great when you want to configure the keys in the kibana keystore; you have to reference the secrets with the index they are in the array, like so:

node src/cli_keystore add xpack.actions.preconfigured[4].secrets.password

(note, customers would use bin/kibana-keystore, but that doesn't work in dev envs, you need to use node src/cli_keystore instead)

Going to look to see how changing the structure so it's an object with action ids as they keys works out. That should allow you to do something like the following, where mySlack is the id of a pre-configured slack action:

node src/cli_keystore add xpack.actions.preconfigured.mySlack.secrets.password