Kibana Windows MSI package

This is an experimental status issue, documenting known remaining tasks before Kibana is ready to move to GA as part of Elastic Stack Installers. This repository contains MSI package build framework (ElastiBuild) capable of discovering various artifacts from local file system and artifacts API, fetching, unpacking and building supported MSI packages.

• Support building and testing Kibana MSI within ElastiBuild framework.

Below we outline a high level plan of changes that will help us achieve the above goals:

• Ensure Kibana Static-FS effort produced packages which build within Release Manager supported branches. (ref: Integration of a static filesystem for the node_modules kibana#47998). Without Static-FS unpack, build and install times are outside of "normal" times on Windows for a number of reasons
• Evaluate solutions for file paths exceeding 260 characters when unpacking and/or installation, discovered during initial testing
• Implement long file path handling in Package Compiler project
• Implement guard/warning for long file paths at install time
• Internal refactoring of ElastiBuild Package Compiler projects
• Support for parsing, fetching and unpacking Kibana-specific artifact names (vs Beats and Elasticsearch) - archives sourced from artifacts-api have consistent names.
• Evaluate options and decide on implementation for running Kibana as Windows Service
• Implement running Kibana as Windows Service and appropriate installer support
• Decide on per-user vs per-machine install option based on Kibana paths configuration #63
  Per-machine: We want the option to run Kibana as a service as well maintain consistency across other installers

Issues:

• Printing from a service Unable to print visualizations when running as a service #65

Note to self: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-net-abstractions

[tylersmalley]

Update regarding the static-fs (elastic/kibana#67124)

Out of an abundance of caution and to ensure we're shipping high-quality, defect-free software, we've decided to revert the use of the static filesystem for the moment. It should be noted that there are no known issues with the implementation. The largest concern is that the static-fs currently relies on monkey-patching the fs module, and there isn't sufficient test coverage to ensure unintentional side effects weren't introduced. Since the static filesystem is only used by the distributable version of Kibana, it's only indirectly tested by our API integration tests and UI end-to-end tests, which doesn't provide sufficient coverage.

We're still pursuing drastically reducing the number of files within the zip. With the last of the plugins migrating over to the new platform, we will soon be able to remove Webpack from the distributable which will have an impact. Additionally, after that is done the surface area of static-fs monkey patching can be reduced. Will keep you up-to-date.