Composer installation verbosity tip

[dannykopping]

Added installation verbosity tip, for users with slow internet connections.

With love from slow South Africa 🌍

[stof]

you should rebase your branch on top of the upstream master branch to remove these 2 weird merge commits from the history.

When creating a feature branch, it should generally be created based on the state of the upstream master branch to avoid such weirdness

[dannykopping]

Thanks, yeah I should've done that... It's done now

[javiereguiluz]

👍 thanks for adding these tips @dannykopping!

However, for the tip added in the Getting Started tutorial I think that we should be more explicit about what does "add the -vvv flag" mean. This tutorial is targeted for newcomers and it could be hard for some of them to correctly understand that phrase. Maybe we should display something like $ composer -vvv ... But before making any change, let's see what do @weaverryan @wouterj and @xabbuh think about this.

[xabbuh]

@javiereguiluz I like adding the example code block. I would also provide an example code block for the first part of the tip. Maybe it's also better to split them into two tips as they are not really related.

I would then suggest to change the wording a bit, so that you first explain the problem and provide a solution then. I think something like this is good:

.. tip::

    Sometimes, especially when your Internet connection is slow, running the
    ``composer`` command may look like it does nothing at all. You can use
    the ``-vvv`` flag to let Composer print all activities it is doing in
    the background:

    .. code-block:: bash

        $ php composer.phar create-project -vvv ...

@dannykopping @javiereguiluz What do you think?

[javiereguiluz]

@xabbuh I love your proposal! The only minor thing is that I think that Internet should always be capitalized.

[xabbuh]

@javiereguiluz 👍 (updated the comment)

[dannykopping]

Much better! Thanks

[xabbuh]

We use the oldest still maintained Symfony version. So I don't think that this should be changed.

[dannykopping]

Ah ok, sorry - I was bringing this in line with the changes i made in #4091

[weaverryan]

Yep, let's change this back :)

[xabbuh]

@dannykopping What do you think about also adding example code blocks to the tips?

[dannykopping]

In this instance specifically, or in general?

[xabbuh]

I think it's worth to add it to all tips you added for the -vvv flag.

[dannykopping]

Sure, but what would you suggest putting in the 'code block'?

[xabbuh]

I would suggest the tip to be like what I suggested in this comment.

[dannykopping]

OK - I will clean this up tonight and implement the suggestions

[wouterj]

Hmm, I like what you're trying to solve here, but I'm not sure this is the correct option.

-vvv is the DEBUG verbosity. Installing the framework isn't about debugging at all, it's all about usage.

So what is the original problem? I believe it's the fact that Composer is not verbose enough at normal verbosity. I think we should solve that instead, e.g. by using the ProgressBar helper to show the progress instead of showing all details about every action done by Composer.

What do you think @dannykopping ? If you agree, I would recommend to open an issue in composer/composer and see what the composer guys think about this.
If you don't agree, that's fine! Then I would suggest to use @xabbuh's proposal and also move this to the book installation chapter.

[dannykopping]

I really like that idea, given that we have the ProgressBar helper.
Imagine you're trying to install Symfony on a 4Mb DSL connection (2Mb is the median connection speed in South Africa) - it can appear as though something has stalled oftentimes; the reason why I suggested the DEBUG level is because this at least shows you that Composer is doing work.

I'll definitely add an issue in composer/composer - nice idea!

[dannykopping]

It's already planned apparently
composer/composer#2809

Maybe I'll put something together over the weekend and send you a PR and a penny for your thoughts @wouterj?

[xabbuh]

I'm not convinced that the progress bar will resolve the issue that made @dannykopping adding the -vvv flag. In case of slow internet connections, the progress bar would move forward so slowly that you wouldn't recognise any difference, would you?

[dannykopping]

That's a good point, but if it could be customised to show the bytes downloaded vs bytes total - that would resolve it. I'm thinking of something like a wget-style output

[wouterj]

@xabbuh the same applies to the -vvv flag.

[weaverryan]

Thanks Danny for starting this! I'm ok with merging this in, but I think getting a progress bar added to Composer is much much more impactful. I hear people complain about this all the time - I would love to at least be able to show progress (and even better would be to speed up Composer - I didn't realize how many JSON requests it makes for metadata).

@dannykopping I just left you 2 small comments.

Thanks!

[stof]

@weaverryan for most people, the slow part is not the metadata loading, but the dependency resolution itself

[weaverryan]

@stof I always thought that too, but when I run -vvv, those downloads take at least a significant amount of time (and since there's no while the dep resolution happens, I'm not sure how long that part takes).

[weaverryan]

These messages look good to me now. Thanks Danny!