Category: Development

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Multiple computers, the benefit

Multiple computers can help you find more bugs in your Apps

I have a few computers that I use, most people would say too many, for me though, it works. Having multiple computers gives me the freedom to work in more than one location. I have my main desktop in my office, my old still usable desktop in my wife’s office space and two laptops, a Surface Book and a Macbook Pro. Both the Macbook Pro and Surface Book are a little long in the tooth, but they still work well enough for when I need to take a machine onsite for freelance or contract work.

Why am I mentioning I have a use multiple PCs, well, there are a whole host of development problems that you solve because you use multiple machines. Additionally, because I use multiple machines, I tend to make fewer changes to my setup than I used to. Other than my IDE of choice and Docker, my setup is simple, this makes it easier to replicate across my computers.

What is the gain?

So, what is the gain? Well, you can only use multiple PCs if your Apps are setup on each of them, this is the benefit, because you have to setup each App more than once you quickly get to spot any issues, if you added an extension when you developed a feature, boom, you’ll notice, if it isn’t easy to get your tests to run, boom you’ll notice. It also gives you the opportunity to test the first install process for your Apps, you’ll quickly notice the necessary data you added outside of a migration or the path that isn’t mapped.

Yes, having multiple computers is a luxury, the thing is though, keep your old stuff, it is more functional than you realise.

If you don’t have multiple machines, you can always use someone else’s, add an account to your partner, child’s, siblings, or parents’ computer, with their permission of course. Even if you only rarely setup one of your projects on another machine, you are bound to spot an issue you didn’t know existed.

Simpler than years ago

These days tools like Docker have solved a lot of the problems we used to experience but I still think you will find an issue or two when you setup an App fresh on another computer, especially if that App has been in development for a while or moved beyond basic functionality.

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Don’t stiff clients, upgrade your stuff

Image shows a click with the text "Time to upgrade"

A client recently asked me to setup a Silverstripe site on their server. They were in the process of getting the files and database extract to me and then I would be good to go. I hadn’t used Silverstripe since 2008 but figured, why not? Setting it up on a new server shouldn’t be too much of an issue…oh boy, was I wrong!

After a while, I received the files and a database dump. Everything seemed ok although I was surprised to see an included vendor folder. I checked the composer.json file to see what I was working with and well, I was a little concerned. PHP was set to 5.6 and all but two requirements were set to dev-master and silverstripe/recipe-cms was set as 4.2.*, released sometime in 2018.

Get it working

OK, so the developers had installed Silverstripe in 2018 and never felt the need to upgrade it, not even once. So I thought, I’ll set up a dev environment and get going.
I created a Docker container with PHP5.6, MySQL 5.7, and a few extensions. I copied everything in, including the vendor folder and managed to get a half working website running. It wasn’t quite as easy as described as I needed to work out what extensions I needed and fix a couple of minor bugs, but the site was working.

I thought cool, now I can start upgrading the site. It was at this point I recalled every dependency was set to dev-master. So the first step was to set the correct version for each dependency. Well, the version as of 2018 and get a composer install to work.
I checked the installed.json inside vendor/composer and found the commit hash for each dependency. I then found the related version on GitHub and updated the composer.json. This was tedious work; however, I figured I was working towards getting a working composer.json. When done, I discovered this wasn’t going to work; the provided composer.json did not create the included vendor directory and there was too much stuff missing.

I decided to go back to basics and create a brand-new composer.json including every package listed in vendor/composer/installed.json. Eventually I got to the point where I could run composer install with no vendor directory or composer.lock file and get a working vendor directory. Awesome!

Although this worked, I couldn’t yet start upgrading as there was too much listed in my composer.json. I started checking each package to see if it was a core requirement or a dependency of something else and pruned the composer.json file down to the bare minimum. Several hours later, I again had a working composer.json file.

Upgrade it

A day in and I had a working Silverstripe site, running on PHP5.6 and MySQL 5.7. I was also confident I could clear the “vendor” directory and recreate it. As joyous as I was, I was no further along. I couldn’t put this online as I needed it to be running PHP8.0 at a minimum and MySQL8. Additionally, I was having to use composer 1.10.26 – that also had to change.

I started the upgrade process; I went step by step starting at 4.2.0 all the way up to version 4.10.0. At each release, I would trash the vendor directory and composer.lock file and see if I ended up with a working site. It was slow as I kept needing to tweak things. Every time Silverstripe added support for an updated version of PHP, I would rebuild my Docker container and test again, slowly fixing bugs and correcting dependencies as I went. As soon I was running PHP8, I switched to MySQL 8 and manually updated the database schema.

Stable & Supportable

The site is now sitting on a staging server for the client. There are a few small issues here and there that I need to fix, and I need to continue upgrading to the latest version of Silverstripe, however, for now, this client is happy.

The moral of the story – upgrade your stuff. If you are selling a website to a client, at least have the decency to upgrade it. Handing them a hot mess four years later is disgusting and the “development house” in question should be ashamed of themselves.

I’m not going to name the “development house” as I don’t know if this was a one off. I expect not but it isn’t for me say as I never dealt with them directly, I just had to pick up the mess.