Skip to content

Create completely blank page to develop and test front-end code in isolation

As part of the acceptance criteria for Rapid Diffs we need a way to isolate the application from the rest of the GitLab product.

Criteria 3 and 4 both set very low limits for bytes to load, which would be hard to tune in the noise of a typical page load (approximately 3MB on production).
Criteria 6 requires this isolation as a matter of fact.

Some guidelines:

  • When the page finishes loading, the browser network tab should look something like this:
    • Note that the favicon load is initiated automatically by the browser.
  • We must be able to add arbitrary CSS and JavaScript to this page
    • This must skip a compilation step (e.g. Webpack/Vite), which would add a huge amount of weight and bloat to the compiled file
      • There needs to be a location (e.g. some kind of /public folder) where we can drop test files that can be loaded directly by the native browser module loader.
  • We must be able to opt back in to some add-ons arbitrarily.
    • For example:
      • we may want to test with adding the standard GitLab authentication to the page
      • we may want to test re-adding the global stylesheet (e.g. gitlab-ui to the page)
      • etc.
Edited by Thomas Randolph