The Registry - Magento 2 dev podcast
Peter Jaap Blaakmeer, Jisse Reitsma
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Magento 2 podcasts by developer, for developers
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Feb 18, 2021
Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment
Full transcription below.
Some show notes
https://github.com/run-as-root/gitlab-pipeline-templates
https://github.com/mediact/testing-suite
https://github.com/phpro/grumphp
https://github.com/captainhookphp/captainhook
https://github.com/rectorphp/rector
https://github.com/fabpot/local-php-security-checker
https://github.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse-ci/
https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate
https://github.com/Brunty/cigar
https://github.com/sitespeedio/sitespeed.io
https://github.com/zaproxy/zaproxy
https://github.com/phpstan/phpstan
https://github.com/exakat/php-static-analysis-tools
https://github.com/jalogut/magento2-deployer-plus
https://github.com/userfrosting/fortress
Transcription
Jisse 0:01
Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Podcast Registry number 2021.5 CI/CD, I guess, right?
Peter Jaap 0:15
Yep.
Jisse 0:16
There are two Dutch guys, Peter Jaap and me. Yes Sir.
Peter Jaap 0:21
Hello.
Jisse 0:21
We're going to talk about Tech stuff, Magento stuff and Oriented for back end developers, I guess. In this episode, we're going to focus upon CI/CD. Basically, maybe an introduction a little bit about what we understand of CI/CD. What it's should be doing? How it fits into our own businesses and etc.? But Peter Jaap you came up with a topic.
Peter Jaap 0:48
I think, actually, you did.
Jisse 0:50
I did already. So, actually, I have to admit that something else is on my mind. So, you notice Swedish Chef, who says like, a bird, bird, bird, bird. Have you heard about the Finnish Chef, who for, who for, who for. It's changing our agenda quite a bit. The new front ending of internet supported by internet. So, who face is on the rise? But we're not going to talk about that. There was the previous episode. Number four was dedicated toHyvä. Today, talking about CI/CD. So, what is CI?
Peter Jaap 1:40
What is CI? CI/CD is accommodation of "Continuous Integration" and "Continuous Deployment", those two topics are a lot of the times combined, mentioned in one sentence, CI/CD. But if you split them up, they're actually two parts. So you have the Continuous Integration (CI) part and the Continuous Deployment (CD) part. So, let's start with Continuous Integration. What is Continuous Integration? I'm not going to give 100% correct definition, but I'll say what I interpret SCI and I guess that resonates with most people. Because he was integral part in your code flow, where you integrate all the different lines of code, all the different packages, all this other stuff, you combine and have written yourself into one monolith in most cases and you check, mostly whether it integrates with each other. This could be unit tests, although those are more on a unit basis. So, not necessarily integration but that's usually part of this step and Integration Tests is like, End to End Tests.
Jisse 3:01
The Integration Tests of Magento itself as well. So, kick starting the Integration Testing Framework MFTF (The Magento Functional Testing Framework) for Instance has told a part of it.
Peter Jaap 3:13
Cypress IO is used a lot.
Jisse 3:16
Definitely, yeah.
Peter Jaap 3:18
Stuff like that. So, that's the integration part and then you have the continuous deployment part that's where you actually push code to a test environment or review environment and acceptance environment, whatever you want to call it and eventually to a production environment. So, what's this "C"? Because now we've talked about integration and deployment. So, why is it continuous? It's continuous when you trigger these actions, mostly using pipelines, automatically when there's a commit or attack release. So, you automate this stuff, you don't have to do it manually. And then when the pipeline succeeds, then all the checks have passed and you're fairly confident to be able to put your new stuff live. The main benefit of CI/CD is assurance, more assurance than you otherwise would have to deploy stuff. Because you are supposed to have some rigid testing in place, that almost guarantees that nothing will break when you put it live, if you have set it up correctly. This is a Utopia in my opinion, stuff will still break.
Jisse 4:42
Yeah. I think the burden always is that it's quite an effort to put it all up and make sure that it's functioning. So, what would you say about the costs involved to set up everything properly, compared to actually the benefits in general.
Peter Jaap 5:01
In general, it by far outweighs any cost to set it up, especially now since all the systems have become so much easier. I remember when we set up CI/CD for Magento One like, five, six years ago, that was painful. Magento one didn't really Lint itself. They have supported the building stuff like that. The tools we have now weren't as great. Back then as they are now. There were a lot less people working on it back then. So, it was a lot less support, a lot less blogs, and a lot less general knowledge in general about CI/CD. I think when we first set up our deployment pipeline and our review, our testing environment system, which we'll talk about later, probably, I think I spent like, three or four months, full time on building this setting it up.
Jisse 6:03
Yeah. To me like, well, it sounds maybe that you're much more experienced with this whole stuff than I am. However, as soon as I'm using a looking at my own business. While I'm not busy with projects. I have a couple of projects, but those are my own, then I have extensions, I've micro services, I've got a lot of diversity in there. My tool here is never the same. So, it's all sounds pretty impressive. Seeing you talk about all of this stuff that always comes to the natural.
Peter Jaap 6:38
I always feel the other way around that you know more about this stuff than I do. I always say, with your extensions, I always see you're setting up test environments, Unit Tests End to End Tests.
Jisse 6:50
The funny thing is I guess, it's a totally different thing. So, for all my parts, the testing part is much more important, because I'm focused upon extensions that are reusable in numerous environments. Therefore, I need a certain guarantee, easier to apply with. But that's maybe the continuous integration part. So, the continuous integration part is on my end, pretty important. While continuous deployments, I've got a couple of scripts, doing stuff, making sure that everything just works. So, I think, it's also fair to say that it just depends upon your needs and maybe one of the points that I'm always trying to make with regards to testing but it's also true for CI/CD is that if it's overwhelming at first, to get started, then don't try to equal us. Don't try to complete everything at once. But just start with a minor, simple step and see that step actually catch human error, small little mistakes that are caused by this automation process. And if you do that, once you start to see the benefits, and then you can do it another time and another step and so on.
Peter Jaap 8:04
So, what will be the first step in your case?
Jisse 8:07
Yeah, I think actually, the first step is to guarantee that it goes on the hosting or on the local development environment, it's just managed in a correctly. So, one of the things that I still remember of a couple of months ago is that I have created this Microsoft Office for myself, based upon YAML files, and then sooner or later, I created a little typo in that YAML file. Well, there was no any kind of tooling that prevented that eyeball to go live in production. I only found out about it two days later. The Microsoft Surface was basically debts, but hidden away behind all other micro services and a couple of websites and I simply didn't notice it. I should have called that simply by linting YAML. Now, that could be part of the CI/CD part as well. But it could also be just part of your local community.
Peter Jaap 9:07
What is linting for the audience?
Jisse 9:11
Linting, I don't know the perfect definition but it's basically…
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Nov 20, 2020
Hyväaaaaalalalalalala
Full transcription below the show notes
Show notes
We talked primarily about https://hyva.io/
Some other links we mentioned along the way:
* https://tailwindcss.com/
* https://github.com/alpinejs/alpine
* https://laravel.com/
* https://laravel-livewire.com/
* https://reactjs.org/
* https://vuejs.org/
* https://angular.io/
* https://jquery.com/
* https://knockoutjs.com/
* https://github.com/magento/pwa-studio
* https://github.com/SnowdogApps/magento2-alpaca-theme
* https://www.shipperhq.com/enhanced-checkout
* https://github.com/SnowdogApps/magento2-vue-checkout
Full transcription
Jisse: Hi, everyone. Thanks for tuning into the registry number four. Oh, and I made a little bit of mistake actually while starting because we were supposed to start in Dutch. So my accent is going to be very, very Dutchy.
Peter Jaap: Very Dutchy?
Jisse: Very Dutchy. And Peter Jaap?
Peter Jaap: Hello
Jisse: Hello. And Willem Wigman.
Willem: Hallo
Peter Jaap: Willem Wigman.
Jisse: Yeah. So The Registry, the podcast number four. And I had to ask Peter Jaap before we started, because I simply lost track. It feels like we have been talking about nonsense for ages already.
Peter Jaap: It is only four? I thought it was 14.
Jisse: 42, yeah.
Peter Jaap: 42
Jisse: But yeah, so the format is a little bit different. Instead of boring all of the listeners with two Dutch guys talking, we thought we can do better. So there are three Dutch guys. One from the middle of the Netherlands, so that's me. One from the North, that's Peter Jaap, and one from the South, that's Willem. So hi, Willem.
Peter Jaap: The deep South.
Willem: Hallo.
Jisse: Yeah, that’s the accent.
Willem: Yeah. I come from the warm place in the Netherlands.
Peter Jaap: That's why you're the only one without a sweater. I get it now.
Willem: Yeah.
Jisse: Yeah. So in the South, it's about 0.01 degrees warmer. So indeed, it’s quite a difference.
Willem: Yeah, climate--
Jisse: So thank you, Willem, for joining us.
Willem: Thanks for having me.
Jisse: Yeah, we came to this conclusion that it might be nice actually, to have you talk a little bit about the new thing that you've created. And I think a lot of the listeners will know about it but yeah, there was actually almost no attention for it during ReactorCon, and nobody asked you to do any kind of podcast or interview ever since. So actually, from the community, it was just dead silence. And we felt it was time for a change, right?
Willem: Yeah, I would like some change as well. That's been kind of the headline of what we've been doing. Yeah, and certainly not enough attention.
Jisse: Yeah. And so the obvious start always is with what it's called. So the name is Hyfa, hoofa, hufter… So what is the real pronunciation? Here we go.
Willem: Huva.
Jisse: And that's Swedish?
Willem: It’s Finnish.
Jisse: It’s Finnish.
Willem: Finnish, yeah.
Jisse: It’s finished.
Willem: It’s Finnish, yeah. People are going to have a hard time recognizing where it's sarcasm and where we're being serious. They're used to it from you but maybe from me, it's new. But to say the first serious thing here, Hyva is Finnish, and it means good, desirable, and trustworthy. So it has a lot of positive meanings and Finnish.
Jisse: Yeah. And I think in general, do we want to make sure that people get the memo? Could you maybe describe Hyva in a few sentences?
Willem: Yeah, sure. So as a lot of listeners might well be aware of Magento 2 front end has been kind of an issue since Magento 2.0. Arguably, before, a little bit as well, but especially since Magento 2.0. The whole knockouts require jazz front end has been a pain to work with. It has become a bigger and bigger problem to have it performant and score well in Google. And it's just as a developer, it's no fun at all to work with. Magento has decided that the solution for this is not to fix the front end but to replace it. That's PWA Studio and headless. So there's a lot of PWA solutions now that will replace the old Magento 2 front ends but none of those solutions really suited me and I guess I can say the agency Integer_net where I work.
Also didn't feel at home with the new solutions that are currently being provided, and we don't really believe in the whole PWA heavy JavaScript framework solutions. And so what Hyva is, to just round it up, and then I'd be glad to take your criticism already. So Hyva is our attempt to fully replace the old Magento 2 front end, which is still PHP, HTML, CSS based. It's fully server-side rendered, and you could say it's the current Magento front end redone in a good way. So it's performant, it's less complex, and it's fun to work with. And speed in which you can develop things is much, much faster than what we've seen with the old front end and what we've seen that PWA currently offers.
Jisse: Yeah. Well, and I think Peter Jaap and I, we both know a little bit more about Hyva as well. We've seen the ReactorCon presentation that you ran there. And in general, could you say also that the real innovation of Hyva is that you simply just dump all of the JavaScript and write it into as less JavaScript as possible?
Willem: Yeah, so we're trying to leverage the capabilities of modern browsers as much as possible. And a modern browser is perfectly capable of, as an example, to do form validation. We don't need 500 kilobytes of library to do form validations because your browser is perfectly capable of doing this. It's just a lot of developers don't really realize this because we've been depending on libraries for so long since jQuery was released years and years ago. We kind of went to the developer approach, where we use a library that serves multiple browsers and fills the gaps of capabilities that those browsers have. So we use a library because then it also works with Internet Explorer. That's how we used to do it. And now we're still used to using libraries for all the little features that we need. And in most of the cases, we don't need these libraries anymore.
And as soon as you look at this, React and Vue and all these PWA libraries or frameworks, they heavily rely on frameworks. And it will always come with at least hundreds of kilobytes of boilerplate JavaScript, while you then have nothing but a page that renders. Then on top of that, you need to write a lot of code to actually also render HTML. And your browser can both render HTML, you can render your code on the server already, and then your browser has to do very little to create an interactive page. So in my opinion, we kind of drifted away from the core principles of web development, and I wouldn't say that there's no room for app development in the web ecosystem. So if you look at the website of Twitter, or maybe an Adidas, or a Nike, or Amazon, they might benefit from an app like experience, and then it maybe makes sense to ship a lot more JavaScript code. But for the typical e-commerce project, a typical website, you don't need a full-fledged app for that. And besides that argument, the current web browser capabilities can do a lot of things already that don't rely on React or Vue. That's already baked into the browser.
Jisse: Well so I think, to open up for the criticism, the main point that you're making is maybe that Vue and React is maybe too much when it comes to simpler logic, simply just to have a catalog of product pages and category pages to have CMS content out there and etc. But I think, of course, the real benefit of React and Vue is to have the functionality of a single page application. And as soon as you talk about a single page application, it's also about loading, maybe that abundance of JavaScript, but also the CSS only once, because once it's loaded, you can navigate to another page. While theoretically, in your case, if you're navigating from the product page to the category page, the checkout CSS has already been loaded into the browser as well. And of course,…
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Nov 13, 2020
Extensions galore! And did PJ upgrade to Magento 2.4.1 yet?
Full transcription below show notes
Show notes
Extensions mentioned
https://github.com/davidrjonas/composer-lock-diff
https://github.com/magento/quality-patches/blob/master/patches.json
https://github.com/mage2tv/magento-cache-clean
https://github.com/kiwicommerce
https://github.com/olivertar/m2_api_product_images
https://github.com/experius/Magento-2-Module-Experius-MissingTranslations
https://github.com/netz98/headless-guillotine
https://github.com/markshust/magento2-module-disabletwofactorauth
https://github.com/magento/security-package
Meld diff tool - https://meldmerge.org/
Architecture repo - https://github.com/magento/architecture
Database MediaStorage in M2 - https://github.com/magento/architecture/issues/111
File system framework in m2 - https://github.com/magento/architecture/issues/219
Upcoming episodes:
#4 Willem Wigman & Hyva
#5 CI/CD
Full transcription
Jisse: Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode number three of The Registry with me, Jisse Reitsma and--
Peter Jaap: Hello, Peter Jaap here.
Jisse: Cool. So there we are. Yeah, episode three. We started off with episodes one and two, kind of like, a little bit awkward, a little bit eerie like, “Was this going to work? Did we only make it to produce a single episode? Or would this be a series?” But slowly, I think it’s becoming a series, right? So that's a cool thing.
Peter Jaap: I think it's officially a series where you have three.
Jisse: Okay. Not a miniseries, but maybe it's becoming also like one of those long-going series as well. Yeah.
Peter Jaap: Yeah.
Jisse: So the concept is simple. It's two Dutch guys talking about random things related to Magento 2, related to developer stuff, things that we find interesting. Yeah, and maybe the kickstart of everything is we're recording this actually, while Magento 2.4.1 has been out already for, I don't know, like one week, two weeks? Two weeks ago already. So Peter Jaap, did you upgrade already?
Peter Jaap: Well place your bets. What do you think?
Jisse: I think you didn't.
Peter Jaap: No, we didn't. We're helping everybody on to 2.3.6 at this point, which is a really easy upgrade from 2.3.5-p2 where most of them are coming from. I just did one today from 2.3.4, which also was a pretty small step. Wasn't that big, that much of a problem so I like. 2.3.6 was an easy upgrade so I don't know, should I go to 2.4.1? What are your thoughts?
Jisse: Well, if I have to admit, so I'm running a few production shops, and they're actually just doing fine. I see also, agencies that I'm helping out struggling with the same kind of issues that you have. So the real question is like, do you really need it or not? Well, you don't need it to get rid of MySQL search because well, you can do that already with the older version. So yeah, there's not that many improvements that you might be eager to adopt unless you're running a Hettle shop already, something based upon PWA Studio or-- And personally, what I find-- Yeah, go ahead.
Peter Jaap: Or I did upgrade one shop to 2.4.1 because we're starting Hyva implementation on it and that requires 2.4. So I did do one upgrade and it was a fairly simple shop and that went pretty easy. But yeah, that's because of Hyva, but we'll get into that next week. But yes, I lied. I did do one.
Jisse: Hoofa, hoof, hoof, hiff, hife, hifa…
Peter Jaap: Hoova, hoova, hivva, hyva
Jisse: I don’t know what it’s being pronounced as but yeah so actually, this episode--
Peter Jaap: Willem pronounces it as hoova.
Jisse: Exactly. Yeah. And this is episode three.
Peter Jaap: It’s Finnish or something.
Jisse: Yeah. Well, definitely next episode, he's joining us to explain everything, including the right pronunciation and including the real meaning.
Peter Jaap: Oh, good because I don't understand anything.
Jisse: Exactly.
Peter Jaap: I think that mainly has to do with it being front end stuff and I'm not very good on that.
Jisse: Now, for me for the upgrade to Magento 2.4. So I've been doing that upgrade for a couple of simple shops and there, I didn't really find any issues. One of the things that I'm kind of eager to play around with is the controller decomposition. We mentioned this in the previous episodes, and I can see really the differences in loading times that a controller based upon the old extending upon the abstract action or the admin actions that are there. And then suddenly replacing it with one of these, or just an implementation of an interface, a clean constructor that you basically have for your own dependencies, it's just reducing per controller loads about 50 to 60 milliseconds per Ajax goal or per load. That's pretty awesome. But yeah, it's not included in the core. So none of the core modules have been adopting to that new strategy yet because of, well, I don't know, backwards compatibility, and so on. But yeah, so let's not talk about the upgrade any further.
Peter Jaap: So just ripping out all the dependency injection in these controllers is giving you this speed increase.
Jisse: Yep, which makes you wonder, of course, like, “Hey, what on earth is all of that dependency stuff then doing?” Well, it's dealing with events, it's dealing with, maybe also really cool stuff, plugins that are doing all kinds of tricks in there. But if you want to reduce it down to your own controller deciding upon what needs to be done in a very clean and direct way, it's kind of cool.
Peter Jaap: So if you use the decomposited, decom, what’s the word?
Jisse: Decomposition
Peter Jaap: Decompositioned controller, you don't have any events triggering, or is that handled in a different way?
Jisse: So as far as I know, the events are simply skipped. Yeah.
Peter Jaap: Okay. Interesting. So that's a thing to watch out for.
Jisse: Yeah. But maybe that's also the strategy that I think should become more popular - less is more. So instead of just adding more functionality to Magento 2, sometimes it's actually good to reduce functionality, remove things that you have out of the box, just for the sake of performance.
Peter Jaap: So configuration over convention. Less magic, more explicitly, yeah.
Jisse: Yeah.
Peter Jaap: Okay
Jisse: Yeah, now let's skip the rest of the talk about the upgrades. I'm maybe going to ask you next time again, as well.
Peter Jaap: This will be a recurring item in the podcast, “Did PJ upgrade to 2.4?”
Jisse: Yeah, so episode 26, “PJ, have you upgraded already to 2.4.1.?”
Peter Jaap: Who knows? Maybe I'll do one every week and then in like 20 episodes from now, all our clients are on 2.4.
Jisse: Exactly. Yeah, and other news that is out there is Composer 2. So I've been playing around with Composer 2 myself quite a bit already, even trying to implement it in a couple of my own continuous integration steps on my own personal GitLab instance. And if you're using Composer 1 together with prestissimo, then actually the speed is already pretty cool. But now out of the box, it's also there with Composer 2. And you're only going to bump into actually two areas of issues. One of them is something I'm still not able to explain in a maybe correct way, but there's a feature in Composer 2 called canonical repositories. And basically, canonical means that as soon as Composer is going to search for a specific package, it's going to find that package maybe in a single or the first repository that it encounters. But then theoretically, if that same repository is also registered under the same name in other repositories as well - so for instance, both on packages in the Magento Marketplace - then Composer 2 might be bumping into issues. And the solution is quite simple. Just simply add a “canonical is false” flag to the Magento Marketplace, and then you're good to go.
The second one is actually more problematic, as in that if you're using Composer 1 plugins, then those Composer plugins are no longer compatible with the new Composer 2 API. So that makes you wonder like, “What…
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Oct 1, 2020
Adobe Developer Live, more Composer musings and random ramblings
Full transcript below the show notes.
Show notes
Adobe Developer Live
* React Spectrum, React Aria, React Stately
* PWA Studio: Checkout + PageBuilder, Product Recommendations, internationalization
* DevExchange discussions
* SUT (Safe-Upgrade Tool)
Composer & patch utils
* https://github.com/AmpersandHQ/ampersand-magento2-upgrade-patch-helper
* https://github.com/vaimo/composer-patches/
* https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/magento-2-composer-patche/gfndadbceejgfjahpfaijcacnmdloiad
* https://github.com/szeidler/composer-patches-cli
Other extensions / tools
* https://github.com/baldwin-agency/magento2-module-url-data-integrity-checker
* https://github.com/elgentos/regenerate-catalog-urls
* https://github.com/fisheyehq/module-url-rewrite-optimiser
* Jisse’s replacement of ElasticSearch under Magento 2.4 - https://github.com/yireo/Yireo_RemoveSearch
Lesser known Magento repositories;
* https://github.com/magento/community-features/issues
* New Config Product - select simples manually - https://github.com/magento/community-features/issues/208 - also note extension https://github.com/PiscesThankIT/ThankIT_ConfigurableWizard
* Disable modules per environment - https://github.com/magento/community-features/issues/126
* PHP 7.4 preloading support - https://github.com/magento/community-features/issues/98
Transcript
Peter Jaap: Hey, how are you?
Jisse : Good, so this is the day after Adobe Developer Live, but yeah, we just had to admit that we didn't spend the whole night just attending that event, so you didn't do anything at all with it, right?
Peter Jaap: No, I had my day off yesterday, so I was focused elsewhere, I didn't watch any presentation, but I got to use it.
Jisse: Yeah, so actually, the program started at 3:30, I think Amsterdam time, so at that time, I wrapped up a meeting I was in and then just tuned in to the opening keynote, andI had a couple I needed to drop in and out of the whole program, but I think I got a couple of good points out of it. Yeah, so don't we develop a live, the first time actually that it was no longer just a Magento event, but also an Adobe event, so to me that's kind of like the first interesting point about the whole thing that was labeled Adobe developer live and then column Magento Commerce as in maybe there's going to be a lot more other Adobe developer lives, but then focused upon other areas of Adobe. Still, this one specifically was for Magento Commerce.
Peter Jaap: Yeah of course
Jisse: So I think there was the usual talk about the route map not necessarily, or at least I didn't hear about Magento 2.4.1 necessarily, it was just over all what kind of developments were happening. So, I listened to a couple of them, a couple of features were added to PWA studio or are going to be added to the PWA Studio, which is kind of my thing, Product Recommendations and Internationalization GraphQL stuff. It was kind of interesting to see that it was no longer just a Magento thing but also an Adobe thing, and I've been personally intrigued about the introduction of React Spectrum, so I heard about this over a few months ago.
React Spectrum is a react vAriation of Adobe spectrum and Adobe Aria and Adobe Stately. Adobe Aria and spectrum are basically UI component libraries that allow developers to just focus on maybe the features instead of the UI, but its kind of feels like it's all related to the Adobe experience cloud so not necessarily related with Magento but still relevant. I think to anyone who wants to combine Magento and Adobe experience Cloud more and more. So yeah, to me, it was kind of interesting to see the direction instead of the technical details reading from that.
Peter Jaap: So, this all going to be part of the PWA studio or is it separate from it?
Jisse: Well, that's a huge question mark for me, but my feeling is that the React spectrum is separate from PWA Studio. So, it's just a separate Library also developed by a separate department.
Peter Jaap: PWA Studio was implemented.
Jisse : Well, that's one of the bigger questions because in road map of PWA studio, I noticed that there's a checkout coming, and then within this checkout, there's an integration with PageBuilder so that people can use PageBuilder to add in specific content types within the checkout system. I'm not sure how much of that PageBuilder is going to be integrated with experience Cloud, but I was under the impression that on the long run, this integration should be happening. So, PageBuilder picking up on logic and picking up on UI possibilities basically of Adobe Experience Cloud. So, with that, theoretically, React Spectrum and Aria would be part of the possibilities as well, so I dived into the technical part of the react spectrum and react stately as well, and to my impression, it's just another UI component library, it is just another set of collection of hooks. Still, then as a reactive developer, if you're into react, the next thing, it's nice to see that there's some kind of UI components library that you could just use and likewise react stately is all about hooks. I didn't look into the practical application of this yet but the other, theoretically, it could be combined with PWA Studio.
Peter Jaap: All right,
Reitsman: so I was kind of eager also to join the DevExchange discussions, but I think that only kickstarted really in the middle of the night, so, I saw a couple of other community members from Europe joining, So I believe they are still sleeping in today and then there was this other tool which I didn't see myself in a talk. But I saw some tweets about it, the Safe Upgrade Tool which is supposed to kind of like inventor eyes your current Magento system when you're looking for an upgrade, but well, that sounds fantastic that maybe there's a gold scan to check for whether the goal that you're running is compatible with the next Magento person that you want to upgrade to but that's kind of like hearsay because I didn't find anything on the web yet. I didn’t find anything concrete about this, so what exactly is the study all about?
Peter Jaap: I did a quick Twitter search on it right now, and I see a tweet from Tadgh Bowe. He tweeted out this diagram for the Safe Upgrade Tool, apparently from the presentation itself from Developers Live, and it shows an upgrade from Magento 2.3.6 to 2.4.1 and then put the Self Ypgrade Tool in the middle. It will compare and validate, it will give you a list of issues and a complexity score and then a big block that says code fix. I’m hoping it will be automatic, but there's nothing and then a big checkmark with the successful upgrade. So, if we look at this diagram, it's going to be very easy. I don't think so, though. So, it says, okay, quickly by focused efforts in identifying conflicts between a new Magento version based on that description. I'd say it has a lot of similarities with the upgrade patch helper by Ampersand. I don't know how many updates we did for our clients. So, I'm assuming that the Safe Upgrade Tool will work pretty much the same as the upgrade patch helper from Ampersand. I'll explain what that one does. What you do is you upgrade the Magento core within your project, before you upgrade, you move the vendor dir to vendor_orig or whatever you want to call it. Then you run a diff on the entire vendor versus the original vendor dir, then the diff will deal with the updated Magento version. That’ll give you a giant patch file, and then you install the upgrade patch helper, which is a PHP file, and you point it towards your Magento installation and you give it the patch file you just created, and then it will spit out a list of all the plugins or themes that have changed or touches files that have changed between the two Magento versions. So, for example, it will give you a type plugin. It will say in the block on the page that PHP has a plugin that is in the …. and that touches PHP code that has been c…
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Aug 28, 2020
Magento 2.4.0 reliability and Composer musings
Show notes
(full transcript below show notes)
Yireo - The unstable release of Magento 2.4.0
Magento Semantic Version Checker
hirak/prestissimo
Composer 2
narrowspark/automatic-composer-prefetcher
Magento 2.3.5 + Content Security Policy (CSP): A Fool's Errand
Private Packagist
Satis
Magento 2 Marketplace Mirror by Fooman
Ivan Chepurnyi on Twitter
Stephan Hochdörfer on Twitter
Full transcript
PJ: All right, everybody. You're welcome at the first Registry podcast. The Registry podcast is done by me, Peter Jaap Blaakmeer
Jisse: And me, Jisse Reitsma
PJ: We're two Dutch Magento developers. I run an agency called Elgentos, and Jisse what do you do?
Jisse: I run an agency called Yireo and what I do is actually I'm not a real agency, but more like a trainer of developers.
PJ: Yeah. I've actually received training from you.
Jisse: Yeah, you did, right? So, sometime back on react. So yeah, I'm kind of busy with a lot of front end stuff, but I think the initial thoughts for this podcast, the Registry is to talk about back end development instead. But yeah, it's your ID so why is it called the Registry in the first place?
PJ: I needed a name that struck a chord with Magento developers and since the Registry is deprecated in Magento too I thought, “Let's just re-live the name if we use it.”
Jisse: Yeah. So the Registry really feels like old. To me, there's also this reminder towards the old Windows age. I'm not sure if Windows is still using a registry. I don’t know anymore.
PJ: Isn't it register, like register.exe?
PJ: Well, it's register.xe or it's referred to as the registry, I thought. But anyway, there's a podcast now called The Registry.
PJ: Yep. And we're going to talk about, well, you said mainly back end development and I guess that's debatable. I'm a back end developer first and foremost, you are originally a back end developer, but you've gravitated towards the front-end a bit more lately.
Jisse: Yeah. Well, and that's maybe also because there's kind of a need within the front end developers to discuss, basically the alternatives that you have for Magento 2 front-ending because there's a lot of things to tell about the Magento 2 frontends. I simply just dive into it a little bit more. But yeah, maybe that's the whole idea about this Registry as well, to talk about interesting stuff to either back end developers or front end developers.
PJ: Yeah or front end stuff for back end developers, which is hard for us.
Jisse: Yeah or back end stuff for front-enders.
PJ: I always have the feeling that's easier than the other way around, but that might be my bias being a back end developer.
Jisse: Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, let's keep the current episode one a little bit focused on back end development stats, but also maybe it may be some general news. So I think when discussing what kind of topics to pick up on I think it was kind of obvious to tell at least a little bit about Magento 2.4, which was just released one week, two weeks ago. I don't know anymore, but recently, a little bit longer, right?
PJ: Yeah.
Jisse: Time flies. But anyway, instead of just doing all of the marketing fluff and saying like, “Oh, Magento 2.4.0 is wonderful. It's great. You should upgrade. I think in this podcast, we want to be a little bit more developer minded or honest or
PJ: Critical?
Jisse: I think so, yeah. So there are multiple features like the MSI performance that went up by refactoring a lot of things. There was this storyline on Twitter telling basically that the dozens of queries were all reduced back into just a couple of queries needed on the front end. Well, that's of course, good news, but it also makes you wonder whether the MSI package was before 2.4.0, then not just really a performance hog.
PJ: It was.
Jisse: Yeah, apparently. So, it's good that it is fixed. Well--
PJ: Have you worked with MSI a lot?
Jisse: No, actually just a little bit, just trying to integrate things with it. But, yeah, I have to be honest, I'm a trainer, so I'm not really diving into projects myself that much, and if I do, that's always a specific area and unfortunately, MSI is still on my to-do list because I like the codebase. I like the way that things are set up in a clean way, that a domain-driven development is implemented and then IDs, like CQRS come into being, but I have to admit that once I see all of this functionality in the codes, I wonder also how difficult it is to configure everything in a real-life project.
PJ: Yeah. Well, we've played around with it. We did one implementation and it kind of backfired at that point because we had some synchronization issues with an ERP coming in and then you have to disable the stock reservations and they need a separate extension for that. So it got muddy at one point and we decided to take a different approach. So in the end we don't use MSI at this point in time, so I can't really say anything about the performance in 2.4.
Jisse: No, but you’re saying currently then you're using the old catalog inventory?
PJ: So basically, yeah. We pull in necessary information from an ERP when we need it and where we need it, but it's not integrated in MSI.
Jisse: So, what I wonder about all of the new features that come into Magento more and more and more is whether all of those agencies or whether all of those developers and merchants out there actually need all of those features at all. Some people do, and of course, it's a wonderful thing that MSI was developed and that there's so much opportunity suddenly with all of those modules. But there's still, I think also a lot of merchants out there that only need a simple inventory management, so basically the old catalog inventory. And now that's slowly being deprecated, which makes me wonder, like, okay, but is the community then maybe able to pick up on maintaining such a simple inventory for a longer time? I think it should be doable, but there still needs to be somebody to pick up on it.
PJ: Yeah. I'm curious to see when MSI will completely replace the old catalog inventory module. Not sure it will eventually happen at all.
Jisse: No. Well, a similar story that is there, of course, is that MySQL, as a search engine has been dropped in favor of Elasticsearch. And again, I think this was clearly announced by Magento as well in all of the release notes about 2.4. So I'm not blaming them for anything, but it's more that I wonder how many merchants are actually needing this and how many merchants are just frustrated about this because they still want to use the old MySQL search.
PJ: Yeah well, I thought the other way. I thought, “Everybody's already using Elasticsearch, let's just kill off MySQL full-text search anyway.
Jisse: Yeah. So, on the technical side, I think it's a good ID, but I simply don't know how many merchants would still be using the old search.
PJ: I think it's okay because Elasticsearch is very easy to configure. All the big hosting companies have Elasticsearch even in their cheapest packages, so I don't think that's a really big deal. MSI is a bit more complex to implement. So that might be a bigger barrier when you compare it with MySQL full-text search versus Elasticsearch.
Jisse: Yeah, exactly. Well, and other than that, 2.4 also ships with silly things like two-factor authentication, and I've seen already three modules two days disable that again.
PJ: Yeah, well, there's nothing wrong with two-factor authentication per se. The problem is that they kind of hardcoded it in the admin and kind of force it upon you. So a lot of developers who upgraded to 2.4 were unpleasantly surprised by this sudden hard requirement to do a, to have a 2FA.
Jisse: It’s pretty cool that there are modules out there already to help you disable the stuff again as well.
PJ: Yeah, I figured it's great that Magento bundles 2FA with Magento, but it's not great that they force it upon you. And I get the reasoning behind it, but it's such a big struggle for develope…
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