Hello everyone,
Is there a plan in place to improve the install, update, and uninstall processes in ERPNext? I think everyone has to agree that there’s room for improvement.
To be fair, it has improved, but from totally unworkable to inconsistently annoying: the setup wizard is much better than it was a year ago, but there isn’t any error logging when it fails, and I think there’s a honest discussion to be had about what error messages to display when a setup fails, because there expectations of different constituencies that need to be considered.
So:
The setup wizard should absolutely log the problems to file an administrator can read but I think, think, I’m OK keeping that out of the UI. A trace can be intimidating to a new user and may be technical enough that causes somebody to quit right there. A link to instructions on how to get the log and where to discuss it will filter those technical or determined enough. I’m not sure that’s the “right” approach but it seems like the best compromise.
As far as general installation woes (frappe/ erpnext itself, not dependencies) I think the Wizard is the crux of it. A CLI wizard-style installer that helps with the dependencies could be built into bench but that’s a non-trivial amount of work and it’s a community/ Foundation problem, not a Frappe Pvt LTD problem. (An aside: erpnext.com has to be considered the reference installation here, but like the vast majority of installations, the customer data and configurations are confidential, and should be. So when you consider where you’re going wrong in your install, you’ve got to keep that in mind; not everything can or should be shared).
I don’t have a better idea than that. I do think this should be a topic for a Foundation committee and/or RFP process.
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