[Bug]: Storybook goes into white screen if code fails in the Manager UI

[yannbf]

Describe the bug

When code in the Storybook Manager UI breaks, such as: foo.bar = 10 where foo is undefined, Storybook crashes completely into a white screen. This has happened a few times in different places in Storybook, most recently (though already fixed) when registering new shortcuts on MacOS and using special characters.

The experience of the crash is the following:

The ideal solution has to be discussed with the team, we should add a global error boundary and provide a helpful error UI (perhaps notifications, similar to VSCode?)

Reproduction link

Reproduction steps

An easy way to reproduce this error is by using a custom .storybook/manager.ts file with code that will break, e.g.:

import { addons, type State } from 'storybook/manager-api'

addons.setConfig({
  layoutCustomisations: {
    showToolbar(state: State, defaultValue: boolean) {
      if (state.storyId?.includes('button')) {
        throw new Error('Boom')
      }

      return true
    },
  },
})

System

-

Additional context

No response

[dosubot]

Storybook's Manager UI currently does not have a global error boundary to catch runtime errors and prevent the app from crashing to a white screen. While there have been improvements in error telemetry—such as queuing errors and filtering out noise from browser extensions in recent versions—these changes do not address UI crash recovery or provide a user-facing error notification system see details.

The Manager UI is built with React, so implementing a global error boundary at the root of the Manager UI would allow you to catch uncaught errors, display a fallback UI, and avoid a complete crash see runtime code. This approach is standard in React apps for improving resilience and user experience.

If you want to explore or prototype a solution, consider wrapping the root Manager UI component with a React error boundary and rendering a helpful error UI (such as a notification or overlay) when an error is caught. This would make crashes more visible and actionable for users and developers.

If you have a minimal reproduction or specific version details, please share them to help investigate further or validate a potential fix.

To reply, just mention @dosu.

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