Sample installation audit

25 January 2017, by Sumana Harihareswara of Changeset Consulting

The following is the report Changeset Consulting delivered to Open Tech Strategies when they asked me to audit the installation process for their StreetCRM project. My client's instructions: try to get a local instance (a developer's sandbox) up and running, note how long it took, file documentation and software bugs, and make pull requests for immediate fixes.

Today I got a dev installation of StreetCRM running on a Debian stretch machine. It took about 71 minutes, about 8-10 minutes of which was waiting for packages to download and install.

A few things tripped me up, and I've made a pull request (https://github.com/OpenTechStrategies/streetcrm/pull/284) and filed an issue (https://github.com/OpenTechStrategies/streetcrm/issues/285) to address them. The biggest problem I ran into was: I started trying to install in /var/www/, but I wasn't root, and I was running into a bunch of problems until I realized that I should start over in a more suitable directory for a development installation. So I fixed that in INSTALL.md.

I recommend that we split INSTALL.md into two sections, one for a production installation and one for a developer/testing installation, so that it's easier for the user to copy and paste -- especially for the sample config file.

I've only spent 2 hours on this so far (including the PR and bug report and writing this summary), so if you want for me to split the installation instructions into a development version and a production version, I can do that. I recommend we work through my PR first to make sure the instructions are correct.

Changeset can deliver this kind of installation audit for your project, to help you prepare for interns or other new contributors. Get in touch for a free initial 30-minute chat.