Auto-installation of modules

By aventurer on 5 Jun 2006 at 02:26 UTC

Currently the way I install modules it to download them to my local machine, upload to my hosted server, gunzip, un-tar, etc. I could probably use wget to simplify a little bit.

What I'd really like is a page in the administration console that would allow me to download modules directly via the admin console on any of my drupal sites. E.g. it would show me the list of available modules for my version of drupal (kind of like rpm services for linux...), allow me to click on any I want, and download, unzip, and un-tar them into my modules directory.

Is there anything that does this already?

Thanks

Technology | Ideas | Startups

Comments

I guess I don't get it..

shayne-1 commented 5 June 2006 at 05:05

Mate, why not just bookmark the modules page on Drupal.org? Then it's one click away. It takes 30 seconds to download and install most modules from start to finish.

Then again, I could be entirely missing your point (it's quite a gift of mine). Perhaps you're hoping not to have to keep track of which version you're running? In that case, the CHAGELOG.txt file will tell you that.

This would be a new project.

laryholland commented 5 June 2006 at 06:12

This would be a new project module. I foresee some versioning issues with modules and their subsequent minor updates which need to be resolved before the project would be successful.

If the drupal project goes to a central repository with versioning of minor updates on the modules it would be extremely easy to go to the website and test against existing modules. Requiring the versioning of minor updates is essential for this task.

We also need to ensure that all module writers use the same versioning system with appropriate diff's between versions. This is definitely worth examining, very similar to serendipity's auto module update features.

Lary Holland

The problem with

greggles

he/him

English

Denver, Colorado, USA

commented 5 June 2006 at 14:03

The problem with auto-installation within the Drupal is that it means that these files/directories have to be writeable by your webserver. Most of the time that is considered to be a security problem.

Ber Kessels is working on some installation scripts to do this and feels that once his scripts are done it will be trivial to add a more user friendly gui to them.

--
Growing Venture Solutions
Drupal Implementation and Support in Denver, CO

--
Morris Animal Foundation

Reasons Why I Want Auto-Installation

aventurer commented 6 June 2006 at 05:23

To provide a little more detail, here's why I want auto-installation.

1) Once I have one site setup the way I want, I want to replicate that configuration and install it on a new server. Supposing I am helping out a friend or getting someone's drupal install working for them. I've spent several days getitng my drupal config the way I want (correct modules, user permissions, settings, etc.). It's kind of like setting up a web server, file server, etc. You want to do it once then be able to replicate multiple times.

2) For a drupal novice like me, it's pretty hard getting drupal setup to a good "default" configuration. I need:
- Clean URL support
- Cron configured
- A few extra modules (image support for example)
- "Edit Primary Links" not to show up on the front page of the site

etc.

If you look through the forums here, you will see people have spent a lot of time trying to get these basic things configured. It would be wonderful if you could download the package and get an installer that said, hey, you can choose from a couple "standard" configurations, and here they are.

Kind of like how Red Hat or SuSE can be installed today versus a few years ago. A few years ago, you had to pick the right modules or you got a pretty rough configuration. Now you can choose between some server roles / pre-defined modules and get pretty much a working config right out of the box that meets particular roles. I want the same sort of thing for drupal.

Hope that helps...
-Dave

Re Versioning

aventurer commented 6 June 2006 at 05:29

Also, I totally agree on versioning issues... I'm definitely not saying this is an easy problem to solve... but one that would be wonderful to have solved. I'd also love to be able to have drupal do an auto-update as well - a la Windows Update. Get me the latest security patches and module updates just by clicking a button in the admin interface.

To summarize, what I want is:

1) An auto-installer for drupal
2) Fetch and replicate
3) Module auto-update straight from the admin console (to make life easy)

-Dave