So, I’m going to make an effort, at least until someone complains or I forget or get too busy or something, to take a few minutes each night to document my efforts on the game, if there are any.
This evening I spent probably four hours working on getting a local instance of M&F running on my Ubuntu machine. Part of my process is before I try to deploy it to a distant server somewhere, I have to be able to get that code to run locally. It’s much faster to troubleshoot things if I don’t have to scp a file every time to test things–I can just open gedit and do direct edits in a nice GUI. (Yes, I know what nano is, and that it can work over ssh.)
This particular evening was confounded by yet another dependency update. Well, two actually. The first one that got fixed was the version of markdown that the game is using. That was highlighted though by another thing getting updated automatically when I installed all the Might & Fealty dependencies: Twig.
Twig is the template system for M&F, and is responsible for how every page in M&F is displayed and loaded. It updated to Twig 2.3, which when PHP tried to compile everything, threw an error in the version of markdown we’re using. Once that was updated, PHP compiled, but Symfony would throw an error in it’s error logs that it couldn’t find the appstate.
The appstate basically tells the code what the user should have access to. Are you logged in? Do you have a character selected? Stuff like that. If it can’t find that, the game literally can’t serve the homepage. Which is the problem I was having.
I spent probably 2 hours on this. Half of that realizing I should’ve cleared the cache, and the other half trying to figure out exactly what was different and what was the “proper” way to fix it.
I’m pleased to report though, that this evening was productive. I’ve gotten M&F to compile and serve pages on my local machine, with a full database of characters and stuff behind it. Tomorrow, I’ll start work on the server that will be hosting it.