License should not be retrieved on anonymous pages

[legrego]

The licensing plugin attempts to query for the current license on page load -- there is some logic in place to prevent this from happening on anonymous pages (such as the login page), but it appears to be an incomplete check. The result is a 401 response on the login page:

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-core (Team:Core)

[pgayvallet]

there is some logic in place to prevent this from happening on anonymous pages

The logic checking if we're on an anonymous page is only here to disable the license refresh based on the kbn-license-sig header. it doesn't disable the initial license fetch or any manually triggered refresh.

We could eventually disable the initial fetching totally, but I'm a bit afraid of the implications, as even on an anonymous page, we load all the plugins.

We already talked about it, but I feel like this issue is bigger than just licensing, and that most plugins should just not be loaded on most (all?) anonymous pages.

[mshustov]

We already talked about it, but I feel like this issue is bigger than just licensing, and that most plugins should just not be loaded on most (all?) anonymous pages.

My +1, considering that we are going to reload the whole Kibana after log in.

[legrego]

I'm torn -- given Kibana's current state, I would agree that most plugins shouldn't be loaded on most anonymous pages.

However, I'd really like to get to the point where we can eliminate some of these page reloads (relies on #59377). If we can get there, then we either need these plugins to load on all pages, or ensure that all plugins are able to complete the full setup/start/stop lifecycle multiple times (i.e., actually clean themselves up during stop)

[Bamieh]

I would agree that most plugins shouldn't be loaded on most anonymous pages.

++. Note that the telemetry plugin benefits from being loaded on every page so it can send us usage data as soon as possible. Since the data is encrypted we dont care if the browser sending the data is on an anonymous page or not.

[pgayvallet]

I just tested on a 8.14 and on main (8.16), and it seems the issue can no longer be reproduced.

Not sure when this changed (I suspect the changes we did a while ago about loading only a subset of plugins on the anonymous pages), but this is resolved.

Closing.