KibanaDev.BasePathProxy

server.basePath is a setting you can set to tell Kibana that it's running "within" a subdirectory of a domain. When this is the case Kibana must include the server.basePath in any absolute URL it creates.

For example: An organization might have a single domain for "log management", https://logmgmt.internal.net, and they want to expose kibana 4 at https://logmgmt.internal.net/kibana4/. They would need to set server.basePath: '/kibana4'

This function works great, but it has to be respected by every url created, and since urls are created all over the place we needed a way to ensure we weren't forgetting about basePath. Our solution is to automatically run the dev server behind a random server.basePath. This way developers would be constantly verifying that their code works with basePath, while they write it.

To accomplish this the serve task does a few things:

1. change the port for the server to the dev.basePathProxyTarget setting (default 5603)
2. start a BasePathProxy at server.port

• picks a random 3-letter value for randomBasePath
• redirects from / to /{randomBasePath}
• redirects from /{any}/app/{appName} to /{randomBasePath}/app/{appName} so that refreshes should work
• proxies all requests starting with /{randomBasePath}/ to the Kibana server

opt out

This proxy can sometime have unintended side effects (like https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues/5962), so when needed you can opt out by passing the --no-base-path flag to the serve task or npm start

npm start -- --no-base-path