Considerations for basePath

All communication from the Kibana UI to the server needs to respect the server.basePath. Here are the "blessed" strategies for dealing with this based on the context:

Write the src or href urls as you would without the base path, but then replace src or href with kbn-src or kbn-href.

<img kbn-src="plugins/kibana/images/logo.png">

Use webpack to import the asset into the build. This will give you a URL in JavaScript and gives webpack a chance to perform optimizations and cache-busting.

// in plugin/public/main.js
import uiChrome from 'ui/chrome';
import logoUrl from 'plugins/facechimp/assets/banner.png';

uiChrome.setBrand({
  logo: `url(${logoUrl}) center no-repeat`
});

Use chrome.addBasePath() to append the basePath to the front of the url.

import chrome from 'ui/chrome';
$http.get(chrome.addBasePath('/api/plugin/things'));

Append request.getBasePath() to any absolute URL path.

const basePath = server.config().get('server.basePath');
server.route({
  path: '/redirect',
  handler(request, h) {
    return h.redirect(`${request.getBasePath()}/otherLocation`);
  }
});

The Kibana dev server automatically runs behind a proxy with a random server.basePath. This way developers will be constantly verifying that their code works with basePath, while they write it.

To accomplish this the serve task does a few things:

This proxy can sometimes have unintended side effects in development, so when needed you can opt out by passing the --no-base-path flag to the serve task or yarn start.

yarn start --no-base-path