Improve installation reliability and reduce common setup friction
- Dominant language
- HTML
- Stars
- 338
- Forks
- 580
- Avg merge
- 6d 1h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 3
Description
Hi everyone,
Over the years I have repeatedly heard developers say that they tried to install _fastlane_, ran into issues during setup, and eventually gave up. I had the same experience myself on my first attempt. I only succeeded later by discovering a couple of undocumented workarounds.
Today I spoke with another developer who had abandoned the idea of using _fastlane_ years ago because of installation problems, which made me realize that these issues are probably causing real attrition. I am sharing them here in the hope that the documentation or the tooling itself can be improved so more users successfully complete their first setup.
I do not feel confident submitting a PR because what follows are workarounds rather than clean solutions. My goal is simply to highlight points of friction that likely affect many first time users.
## 1) fastlane init appears to hang unless run with sudo
When running the documented command:
`fastlane init`
the process gets stuck indefinitely on:
`Installing dependencies for you... bundle update`
For many users this looks like fastlane is broken. In practice, running:
`sudo fastlane init`
allows the process to complete.
I understand why recommending sudo is undesirable. If that is not acceptable, it would be great to either:
- Make fastlane fail clearly instead of hanging, or
- Ensure the default command works without elevated privileges, or
- Document a safer alternative that avoids this issue.
Right now the silent hang is extremely confusing for new users.
## 2) Manual Finder permission changes are required after manual setup
After running fastlane init, selecting option 4 (Manual setup), and pressing enter three times to go through the installation process, fastlane still will not work unless file permissions are manually adjusted in Finder.
Specifically:
- Open the `Appfile` in Finder, press **cmd+i**, and add your own user with `Read & Write` permissions in `Sharing & Permissions`.
- Repeat the same change for the `Fastfile`.
- In some cases, the parent folder permissions also need to be updated.
Without these changes, fastlane fails, and nothing in the documentation warns users about this step.
---
These two issues alone have been enough to unblock everyone I have helped install fastlane.
This might seem minor, but installation is the very first experience users have with the tool. Even small friction here can easily cause a significant percentage of potential users to drop off before ever trying fastlane, which is a real loss for the project.
Thanks for considering this feedback.
Contributor guide
No contributing guide indexed for this repository
Assessment
This issue has not been assessed yet.