Bolt preferred / recommended install research.

research.markdown

Hi there,

I’m gathering feedback on different ways to install Bolt, and their respective ease of use to keep the initial threshold as low as as possible, and to make it a pleasant experience for people doing first-time installs.

Currently, i’d like to know the difference in UX between our “composer create-project” install, and the “quick install” using a packaged pre-configured installation.

Both of these can be done locally on a mac, from the command line. It won’t require a specific database, nor a configured webserver (we’ll use PHP’s built-in one)

You would do me a great favour if you could test these two methods out, and provide feedback. You can send the results to bob@twokings.nl.

Preparation:

You'll need to have a development environment, where you can run PHP. Check these two things first, on the local command line:

php -v

The result should be something like this: PHP 5.6.30 (cli) (built: Feb 13 2017 10:05:49) ( NTS ). It needs to be PHP 5.5.9 or higher.

php -r 'echo "Hello";'

This should print Hello. If you get notices about missing timezones, edit your php.ini file, and set the timezone, like timezone = Europe/Amsterdam. See here.

---

Method 1: Composer create project

Open a terminal on your OSX machine, and go to the “local” folder where you’d like to run this experiment. You can do this in any location, including your home folder (~) or Desktop (~/Desktop).

Run the following:

composer create-project bolt/composer-install:^3.3@beta bolt-project --prefer-dist

If you don’t have Composer installed globally, you will get an error like composer: command not found . In this case, run the following instead:

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
php composer.phar create-project bolt/composer-install:^3.3@beta bolt-project --prefer-dist

Now, the Bolt project will be fetched and installed. At the end of the installation, you'll be asked whether or not to use the default folder structure. For now, just press [enter] to accept the default yes.

After doing the installation, we’ll go into the folder and start the built-in server:

cd bolt-project
php app/nut server:run

You can now and open Bolt in a browser, by navigating to the link you see in the terminal. Most likely http://0.0.0.0:8000.

After doing the initial setup, we’re done with this step. Close the built-in server by pressing ctrl-c. You can now remove the folder bolt-project, in preparation for the next step.

Note: If you get notices about The CSRF token is invalid, just ignore it. This experiment is only about the install process.

Method 2: “Quick install”

Open a terminal on your OSX machine, and go to the “local” folder where you’d like to run this experiment. You can do this in any location, including your home folder (~) or Desktop (~/Desktop).

Create the project folder, and navigate to it:

mkdir bolt-project
cd bolt-project

Run the following:

curl -O https://bolt.cm/distribution/archive/3.3/bolt-v3.3.0-beta10.tar.gz
tar -xzf bolt-v3.3.0-beta10.tar.gz --strip-components=1
php app/nut init

After doing the installation, we’ll go into the folder and start the built-in server:

php app/nut server:run

You can now and open Bolt in a browser, by navigating to the link you see in the terminal. Most likely http://0.0.0.0:8000.

After doing the initial setup, we’re done with this step. Close the built-in server by pressing ctrl-c. You can now remove the folder bolt-project.

Feedback

Now that you’ve done both ways, i’d like to get some feedback on both of them. Could you answer these questions for me, and email them to bob@twokings.nl.

Method 1: Composer create project

1. Rating from 1-10, how successful were you setting it up?
2. Did you encounter any trouble setting up Bolt using this method?
3. Rating from 1-10, how confident about being in control were you?
4. Do you feel this method is user-friendly, and would you recommend it to Novice Bolt users?

Method 2: “Quick” install

5. Rating from 1-10, how successful were you setting it up?
6. Did you encounter any trouble setting up Bolt using this method?
7. Rating from 1-10, how confident about being in control were you?
8. Do you feel this method is user-friendly, and would you recommend it to Novice Bolt users?

Overall:

9. Can you give a reason why you would prefer method 1 over method 2?
10. Can you give a reason why you would prefer method 2 over method 1?
11. Which method did you prefer? Can you briefly explain why?
12. Any closing remarks?

Thank you!

Bob.

(Edit by Bob: please reply via email.. I'll publish results later, but i'd like to keep it open and objective for people trying it out)

Evert: Roger :-)

Done!