[NickJosevski]

Draft, and stacked on #239 — it drives selectors that only exist on that branch, so the base is nj/space-id-dropdown rather than main. Retarget to main once #239 merges.

What this is

SpacePickerManualTest walks the space picker through the real containerised stack in a browser and screenshots each state. It is a driver, not a test — it asserts almost nothing. It earns its keep two ways:

• regenerating the screenshots after a change to the picker's markup;
• making the id-survives-a-rename behaviour something you can watch rather than infer from unit tests.

The walkthrough ends by renaming the Octopus space out from under an already-saved build step. The stored id keeps resolving while the stored name goes stale — which is the entire reason #239 stores an id:

stored octopus_space_id = Spaces-1   space name field = 'Modern Deployments'
renamed space Spaces-1: 'Modern Deployments' -> 'Swordfish'
still stored: octopus_space_id = Spaces-1   space name field = 'Modern Deployments'
              <- the NAME is now stale, the ID is not
dropdown now offers: [-- select a space --, Swordfish (Spaces-1)]

The free tier permits exactly one space (POST /api/spaces → "You cannot create another space. This would exceed the limits of your current license."), so it renames the one space rather than creating several.

Two modes

# Unattended: headless, no pauses, just captures screenshots.
OCTOPUS_PICKER_DEMO=auto ./gradlew :e2e:e2eTest --tests "*SpacePickerManualTest*"

# Interactive: headed, pausing at each checkpoint so you can click around.
OCTOPUS_PICKER_DEMO=1 ./gradlew :e2e:e2eTest --tests "*SpacePickerManualTest*"

Interactive mode prints the TeamCity URL and admin login, holds the stack open, and names the file to create to continue.

Safe to have in the repo

• Skipped unless asked for, via assumeTrue, matching LocalOctopusReleaseLinkManualTest. Verified: 1 test, 1 skipped, 0 failures, in 1s, no containers started. This matters — without the gate it would block forever on the first checkpoint file.
• Writes only under build/reports/space-picker (so clean removes it), overridable with SPACE_PICKER_OUTPUT_DIR. Nothing outside the build directory, nothing tied to one developer's machine.
• Never prints the API key.
• Documented under "Interactive manual testing" in docs/e2e-tests.md, including the checkpoint mechanism, which nobody would guess.

Why in this repo rather than its own

It depends on the e2e DSL — OctopusTeamCityStack, SharedStack, TeamCityRest, OctopusProvisioning, PlaywrightUi — which is test-scope and partly package-private. Publishing or duplicating that elsewhere would be disproportionate.

More importantly it hardcodes the plugin's own selectors (button.octopusLoadSpaces, input[name='prop:octopus_space_id'], #octopusConnectionId). Those must change in the same commit as the JSP; out of the repo they would rot silently and the tool would be broken exactly when someone next needed it.

Verification

OCTOPUS_PICKER_DEMO=auto run: BUILD SUCCESSFUL in 3m57s, all 10 screenshots produced, no checkpoint files, containers reaped. spotlessCheck clean.

Two traps documented for anyone extending it

• Do not set a viewport on the headed browser. A viewport override desyncs the rendered page from the real OS window, and native <select> popups are positioned by the window — they open detached from the control, bottom-right of the screen. Size the window with --window-size instead. Headless tests never open a native popup, so this cannot surface there.
• The picker's fields are addressed as prop:<property>, because that is how TeamCity's props taglib renders a property's name attribute (the id is the bare property name).

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[NickJosevski]

gonna merge this just so there's some "prior art" for this in the repo, instead of getting Claude to re-invent it again. It's just test code in the end, and not part of the pipeline, so cost is low to just delete it if we change our mind.