nextcloud / nextcloud/server

Improve the installation process

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#51,193 2 comments 6 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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1. to develop enhancement feature: install and update
Dominant language
PHP
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Description

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Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Currently the installer is quite minimal, only allowing to configure the admin user and database.
Many admins struggle with creating new instances, because everything else has to be configured manually in the config.php. For that they need to look through the admin manual which is tedious and in some cases there are no good recommendations for different kinds of setups.

Describe the solution you'd like

The installer should become more interactive, such that more things like redis or imaginary can be configured.
Besides that settings like the default phone number region or maintenance window could be set (and which setup checks complain about if they are not).
We should ask for expected instance size, to be able to give suggestions accordingly.

We would need to collect a list of options that make sense here (probably going through the admin manual and maybe asking engineers which options are often used by customers). Of course we could implement every single of them, but that would be too much and make the installation process very unpleasant because you'd need to answer a huge amount of questions.

Then a modular system like setup checks should be put in place, so that we can easily add new options later and also re-use the same information both for the CLI and web installers.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reviewing the admin manual and the existing setup checks, then compare how the CLI and web installers currently collect configuration. Define a limited, agreed list of options and instance-size guidance before designing the modular shared system. Done requires an approved scope and support for adding and reusing options in both installers.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
php
Domain
backend, cli
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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