You don't actually need to install the plugin helpers, they are automatically inherited from the Kibana project by building your plugin within the Kibana repo. To use the plugin helpers just create the needed npm scripts on your plugin's `package.json` (as exemplified below) which
is already the case if you use the new `node scripts/generate_plugin` script.
The plugins helpers in the Kibana repo are available for Kibana 6.3 and greater. Just checkout the branch of Kibana you want to build against and the plugin helpers should be up to date for that version of Kibana.
When you're targeting versions before Kibana 6.3, use the `@elastic/plugin-helpers` from npm. See the [versions](https://github.com/elastic/kibana-plugin-helpers#versions) section of the [`@elastic/plugin-helpers` readme](https://github.com/elastic/kibana-plugin-helpers) for information about version compatibility.
`plugin-helpers` accepts a number of settings, which can be specified at runtime, or included in a `.kibana-plugin-helpers.json` file if you'd like to bundle those settings with your project.
It will also observe a `.kibana-plugin-helpers.dev.json`, much like Kibana does, which we encourage you to add to your `.gitignore` file and use for local settings that you don't intend to share. These "dev" settings will override any settings in the normal json config.
All configuration setting listed below can simply can be included in the json config files. If you intend to inline the command, you will need to convert the setting to snake case (ie. `skipArchive` becomes `--skip-archive`).
`serverSourcePatterns` | Defines the files that are built with babel and written to your distributable for your server plugin. It is ignored if `kibana.json` has none `server: true` setting defined.
Plugin code can be written in [TypeScript](http://www.typescriptlang.org/) if desired. To enable TypeScript support create a `tsconfig.json` file at the root of your plugin that looks something like this:
```js
{
// extend Kibana's tsconfig, or use your own settings
"extends": "../../kibana/tsconfig.json",
// tell the TypeScript compiler where to find your source files