So if you were on today around 2 PM Pacific, you may have seen a horrible slew of downtime, errors, etc. This was due to a few things;
- I really like being on latest and greatest
- I don’t have proper testing or disaster recovery
So what happened you ask? I was utilizing the latest version of Node.js to keep up with the bleeding edge of features. This version included some changes to how dependencies were being tracked. When I performed the upgrade to the latest NodeBB version, the dependencies were moved from one location into another. This is what broke the composer.
I tried a couple solutions to fix things, but ended up having to destroy the plugins folder and start from scratch. It ultimately was a five minute fix to do that, but I was trying to avoid that kind of wrecking ball.
Will this happen again?
Probably. Since we are still relatively small, every change I make is done in production. This means that if I want to install a new plugin, I don’t test it ahead of time. I simply install, reload the forums, and hope for the best. If/when we grow larger, I will be able to have a proper dev environment to test things out.
For now, sorry for the inconvenience!
