Summary

Spaces is currently a hard dependency on multiple of our plugins and solutions.

In order to better support future offerings we need to turn it into an optional dependency.

The purpose of this meta issue is to track our progress in converting all hard dependencies of spaces into optional dependencies.

Status

Link to PRs:

• x-pack/plugins/alerting - Make spaces plugin optional #149044
• x-pack/plugins/security - Make spaces plugin optional #149044
• x-pack/plugins/spaces - Make spaces plugin optional #149044
• x-pack/plugins/cases - [Cases] Make spaces plugin optional #150252
• x-pack/plugins/enterprise_search - https://github.com/elastic/enterprise-search-team/issues/3941
• x-pack/plugins/fleet - [Fleet] Make spaces plugin optional #151897
• x-pack/plugins/infra - [Logs and Metrics UI] Make spaces plugin optional #149973
• x-pack/plugins/lens - Mark spaces as optional on the contracts #150021
• x-pack/plugins/ml - [ML] Changes for optional spaces plugin #151170
• x-pack/plugins/observability - Makes spaces optional in observability plugin #151147
• x-pack/plugins/osquery - [Osquery] Cleanup spaces dependency #151059
• x-pack/plugins/synthetics - [Synthetics] Make spaces plugin an optional dependency  #150003

How to disable spaces

#149044 has reintroduced a config option to disable spaces:

xpack.spaces.enabled: false

This config option is only available in development mode while we are in the process of updating our plugins.

How to make spaces optional

1. Move spaces from requiredPlugins to optionalPlugins in your kibana.json file:

{
  "requiredPlugins": [
-    "spaces"
  ],
  "optionalPlugins": [
+    "spaces"
  ]
}

2. Update setup and start contracts making spaces optional (both server and public):

export interface AlertingPluginsStart {
-  spaces: SpacesPluginStart;
+  spaces?: SpacesPluginStart;
}

3. If your plugin requires a space ID to construct saved object IDs or for other purposes use DEFAULT_SPACE_ID constant from @kbn/spaces-plugin/common package when spaces isn't available:

+ import { DEFAULT_SPACE_ID } from '@kbn/spaces-plugin/common';

function getSpaceId(request: KibanaRequest) {
-  return plugins.spaces.spacesService.getSpaceId(request);
+  return plugins.spaces?.spacesService.getSpaceId(request) ?? DEFAULT_SPACE_ID;
}

An example of these changes can be found in the alerting plugin here: https://github.com/elastic/kibana/pull/149044/files#diff-6e9c0cbc28a51ad0bc9251d157a956f612df837a853cff661edc204d9bde8e14