Direction on developing/debugging

JacobSteelsmith

Thanks for the hard work on Fossbilling. I am using Fossbilling in production with a control web panel server. I have a lot of old school web development experience and wanted to contribute. Are there any guides on the best/fastest way to develop Fossbilling? I noticed CONTRIBUTING.md says instructions for developing locally are in the readme but I'm not seeing them.

I wanted to debug an issue I'm seeing with the password reset emails but print_r(), die(), etc. are painfully slow. When clicking the link from the email the user is redirected to the admin login. I was wondering if there is a resource I could look at to get up to speed on modern php development/debugging that is applicable to Fossbilling. I'm also interested in implementing a password reset that doesn't email the password as it's more secure to let the user set the password after clicking the link in their email.

After that I was going to look at the CWP integration.

I appreciate any advice and thanks again for this project.

wprocketdev

JacobSteelsmith

I am working on CWP too and having some issues getting Paypal to work. Would you be able to help get the installation process documented for CWP Centos?

BelleNottelling

Hello Jacob,

Are there any guides on the best/fastest way to develop Fossbilling? I noticed CONTRIBUTING.md says instructions for developing locally are in the readme but I'm not seeing them.

The readme used to have simple building instructions, but it was removed when the steps got changed (the intention was to write a full guide and put it in our docs). We'll have to get that guide up in the near future and correct the CONTRIBUTING.md file.

Until then, the building steps for FOSSBilling are as follows (all steps are from the main source code directory):

composer install to install the PHP dependencies
npm install to install NPM dependencies
npm run build to build all of the front-end assets.

After that, the src directory is ready be be zipped and uploaded to a web-server.

In terms of debugging, there's not much that is FOSSBilling specific. you can edit the config.php file and set debug to true which will enable the usage of the whoops package for aid in debugging exceptions or unrecoverable errors. Enabling debug will also cause FOSSBilling to send errors to the browser console rather than only to the log file. Other than that, any generic PHP debugging technique should apply to FOSSBilling just fine and you can probably find some helpful info online.

Long term being able to improve the developer experience is something we are interested in and we'd be happy to get some suggestions on how it can be improved. (we know the documentation is currently a pain-point. If you have the time, the docs are open source and we'd appreciate contributions to them.)

Thanks for the interest in FOSSBilling!

Ron-Zarbyte

For anyone interested, I started work on improving developer workflow documentation. The intention is to solve the issue presented by this thread, which is some confusion regarding the best way to extend FOSSBilling from the perspective of an individual developer.

The scope of the changes are going to include both documentation improvement as well as code level adjustments to have a correct working local dev environment.

Take a look at this issue for current progress. If you have any suggestions feel free to reply here, on the issue link, or get in touch with me directly via the FOSSbilling Discord server.