Initial questions for first-time testers

Indigo

At this stage I'm most interested in feedback on the following two things, while your perspective is really fresh 🙂

firstly, is any aspect of the app initially confusing? Is it clear how to get started? Should there be a support doc on any of this onboarding stuff?
secondly, does the app crash or misbehave? Please let me know here in the forums if it does!

Jeff

soniktrooth

First impressions are that it all went quite smooth, and it's easy to understand what's going on. Love the little skeuomorphic servers—makes it feel fun without being too over the top.

First hurdle I ran across was that I got the message that something was using port 80 and 443 but took me a while to work out it was actually Docker. Perhaps it would be nice to report what process was using the default ports to make it easier to diagnose. I imagine most people interested in this app would be coming from Docker so could be a common issue.

Once I quit docker it was more straight forward and I managed to load the welcome.test and then add a Drupal site to the nginx section of My First Stack. Took me a second to work out where the 'root' was for this Drupal site—turned out it was src/www/web. I installed a db and we were off to the races.

Loading the site I was seeing 'deprecated function' errors and realised that I was running a much newer version of php than I should be for this site. So I deleted 8.1 and added 7.4, all very straight forward.

After that, though, it wouldn't serve the site, it would force download the index file instead. So I'm not sure where to go from there.

On the whole though, I'm very excited about this. Running heaving drush commands like config import or cache clearing was insanely fast and and didn't even register a blip on Activity Monitor. So excited that I might be able to do work without waiting 50% of the day. 😀

Indigo

soniktrooth First hurdle I ran across was that I got the message that something was using port 80 and 443 but took me a while to work out it was actually Docker. Perhaps it would be nice to report what process was using the default ports to make it easier to diagnose. I imagine most people interested in this app would be coming from Docker so could be a common issue.

You can actually configure Indigo globally (in the prefs) to use something other than 80 and 443, but it's kinda clumsy to have to append that to every URL eg https://mysite.test:8443. So I agree totally, it would be much more helpful for Indigo to at least give you a clue as to which process is already using the port(s).

I'll put that on my todo list.

Indigo

soniktrooth Once I quit docker it was more straight forward and I managed to load the welcome.test and then add a Drupal site to the nginx section of My First Stack. Took me a second to work out where the 'root' was for this Drupal site—turned out it was src/www/web. I installed a db and we were off to the races.

I've had this issue personally in my Laravel projects; numerous times I've configured the Indigo site root as laravel-codebase instead of laravel-codebase/public.

Did you also initially attempt to use the project root rather than the web root? I ask because I've had the idea that I could pretty easily recognise the framework in use, and detect this common mistake and offer to fix it automatically.

Indigo

soniktrooth Loading the site I was seeing 'deprecated function' errors and realised that I was running a much newer version of php than I should be for this site. So I deleted 8.1 and added 7.4, all very straight forward.

After that, though, it wouldn't serve the site, it would force download the index file instead. So I'm not sure where to go from there.

I have a theory about what might have happened here. When you configured the Nginx site, I'm assuming you would have specifically told it to use PHP 8.1. Then when you deleted the PHP 8.1 service from the rack, it was silently removed from the Nginx site configuration, leaving its PHP config set to "None". If you go back into the site config and set that to 7.4 I'm hoping you'll be in luck.

However, this definitely presents a usability issue. Many people may not initially even realise you can simultaneously run ALL the PHPs simultaneously in one stack if you really want, assigning any version to any site. So it's not like it can fall back to some default if a user deletes one that's in use.

The only solutions I can think of for when you delete a PHP that has been assigned to a site are:
a) Indigo places a warning triangle beside that site and won't start until its config has been re-saved, either with a new PHP version assigned, or "none" selected.
b) ask you to select a new PHP version from those already in your rack (or none) to replace the previous choice for all the sites that had that version chosen.

Neither are great, I fear:
a) has issues with sites being in a state where their PHP config is neither "none" nor a currently valid PHP option. The warning would indicate a problem, but visually the config would be fine.
b) assumes you've already added the new PHP version into your rack, which may not be the case.

Any thoughts on a better workflow around this?

Indigo

Thanks — that's great feedback! You've covered quite a bit, but there are a few items I'm particularly interested in. Hope you don't mind me splitting them out into separate discussions:

adean

I've been looking for something like this for a long time, so first off thanks! Initial setup was very smooth, I assigned custom ports to the web server and didn't have any problems.

I primarily work with the Symfony framework so my first task was to get composer installed. I eventually discovered that the PHP binaries were in ~/.indigo/stacks/2C08BF/php_9FC7/bin, but that took some digging so I think it would be handy if you could launch a terminal with that in your path or there was some other way to get a shell to interact with your stack.

Once I got that figured out everything worked great!

Indigo

@adean sorry I overlooked your post! Launching a terminal with PATHs set is absolutely high on my roadmap. It's something I personally would use often. I've created an issue at https://forums.indigostack.app/d/28-launching-terminal-with-path-set to continue discussion on that.

Glad to hear that otherwise everything worked great for you, especially customising the 80/443 ports to something else 🙂