List issues about difficulty of setting up apps

[alloy]

Over time, apps tend to always get harder to setup, which makes the barrier to entry for contributions tougher.

Apps should be made easy to setup according to where it makes most sense to spend more time on doing so.

I would prefer to not resort to a VM image based system or the likes, as it makes it too easy to not spend time on making things transparent, which will bite us when information is most needed (e.g. cloud apocalypse debugging). As such, we should be able to reason about what is hard for new users and if it's an edge-case or if it really indicates a too complex / not-transperant issue.

Therefore, please list issues you encounter when trying to contribute to one of the apps like so:

I tried to work on app X, for reason Y, and it was hard because of Z.

[floere]

• Working on e.g. search is hard because it needs all migrations. Therefore I suggest we merge all migrations in a project called Humus, for being used in Strata. I am happy to do the work.
• E.g. search needs a specific DB state to work. It's not a problem if the migrations have run. However, it will be hard to maintain. My suggestion would be to maintain it in a central place, to use something like Humus.migrate(test: :search) and that would set the trunk test DB to a useful state for testing search. This would be called from within the search engine test setup, and Humus would do the hard work.

[floere]

I've finally gotten to my two checkboxes. Humus offers Humus.with_snapshot for people with access to the prod DB. Humus itself and search both use it.

[orta]

• Setting up all websites (mainly on the bundle installs) is difficult because of the implicit dependencies within nokogiri and postgres. The Strata rake bootstrap task should verify that you have postgres in your path, and that you have ran xcode-select --install.

[floere]

My solution in the last comment worked only as long as we had a stable set of Humus snapshots. Now we need a spot to store snapshots of our prod DB for testing purposes.

• Find a good spot (auth, stable, future-proof) for prod DB snapshots.