Jonathan Lahijani

This song is a total banger:

@Ivan Gretsky Yes, still using Apache on the LXCs. I've never heard of Incus, but thanks for mentioning it. Seems it started in 2023 so in the early stages. For now, I'm going full force on Proxmox (I spent a lot of time in December and January experimenting with it), but will keep a close eye on it. Users on this post on HN say some nice things about Incus so that's a good sign.

This is a bit off-topic (however related to Caddy), but I have been re-doing my internal development setup, which is now powered by a dedicated Proxmox server (on a Minisforum MS-01) and uses LXC containers for ProcessWire sites. On some containers, I just have one ProcessWire site, and on others, I have multiple. Previously, I just had one bare-metal, dedicated server with all my sites on it, which is very convenient but I lose having parity with my production environments (which isn't a big deal with a typical website, but more-so for mission critical webapps; also I am trying to avoid using Docker). So my internal infrastructure might look like this: lxc1 site1.domain.com site2.domain.com site3.domain.com lxc2 site4.domain.com Since I want some of my development sites to be accessible from the outside on a dedicated subdomain like shown above, this requires the need of a reverse proxy since my internet connection has only 1 IP address. Therefore, I set up another LXC which runs Caddy as a reverse proxy (also set up fail2ban to deal with stupid hackbots) which works so well and it's ridiculously easy to set up and takes care of SSL automatically. I did this just a couple days ago, after not having played with Caddy for a couple years, so maybe this bit of excitement will get me back into using it directly as well.

@Pete I did get far with it, but I never ended up running a site with Caddy so it hasn't been battle tested. I've messaged it to you directly as I don't want to post something incomplete for the public until I've really done my due diligence on it.

From my experience, even asking an LLM (like ChatGPT in their website chat interface) about ProcessWire's architecture is pretty impressive. I spent a lot of time last year using AI to compare (verbally compare, not direct code) ProcessWire to full-stack web application frameworks like Laravel and the language it used to describe ProcessWire, with API variables like $pages, $fields, etc as "services-like objects" was something I've never seen described anywhere (pw docs or forums), but it's technically correct, and a lot of things clicked with me after that. These coding agents do really well with ProcessWire without any special harnesses already. I'm excited for all these upcoming features.

So ProcessWire now has the beginnings of a first-party "schema" (in the ProcessWire sense) migrations system? YES!!!

There may be a time where you need to create a page reference field using the Select inputfield and it's selecting repeater pages. Let's say I have a repeater field called "order_line_items" and I want to create a page reference field called "order_line_item" that allows me to select a repeater item (which is a page) of the "order_line_items" repeater field. Repeater pages are a bit different from regular pages in that their "parent" is a container admin page associated with the page in which it exists (dig into /admin/repeaters/order_line_items/ in your page tree to see what I mean). So when you are configuring your page reference field, you can't really choose a Parent. However when configuring your field, your instinct would be to choose the Template of "repeater_order_line_items". Then because you need extra precision in what pages are actually available for selection (rather than all of them across all pages), your instinct will be to implement custom PHP code: $wire->addHookAfter('InputfieldPage::getSelectablePages', function($event) { if($event->object->hasField == 'order_line_item') { $event->return = $event->pages->find('your selector here'); } }); The problem with that approach is that even though you have defined the custom PHP code and the select field correctly shows the selectable repeater pages in the select field, behind-the-scenes, ProcessWire has still loaded EVERY SINGLE REPEATER that has the "repeater_order_line_items" template (you can see this is TracyDebugger's pages loaded list)! Your site will definitely be slower as a result, dramatically so if you have thousands or tens of thousands of repeater pages of that template. I hit this issue years ago (2018) and I thought it was a bug. I discussed it with Ryan and it's technically not a bug, but kind of the way ProcessWire works, which is beyond this tutorial. While you can circumvent this using the PageAutocomplete field, I don't like the ergonomics of that field in certain situations. I want the good-old select field. The solution to this is to NOT select anything for the "Template" when configuring your field. So in my example, I chose "repeater_order_line_items", but instead, it should be left blank. Now the field will just rely on the code portion and all the unnecessary page loads will be eliminated.

I saw it on HN last week and it caught my eye as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47285876 I will be playing around with it at some point as I love the hypermedia approach of doing things (big HTMX fan). I like that it can do what they call "patch modes" (what other libraries call "islands"?). HTMX can do that too, but it's feels off with the "OOB" approach. That has always bothered me, but I think they are addressing that in HTMX v4. I've played with Alpine-Ajax and Datastar as well, but muJS seems like it best aligns with the way I think.

I spent a few hours this morning making an MCP module for ProcessWire similar to Laravel Boost. I'm going to call it Octopus. In just 2-3 hours with Opus 4.5, I'm already what feels like being done with 90% of it. I'm going to finish the remaining 90% (heh) as I work on various projects to actually test it. I will have to figure out the best way on how to provide ProcessWire documentation to the MCP (hence why I'm on this thread), but even without it, Opus 4.5 is insanely good in following ProcessWire conventions, even with little context! The hype is real. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions. Screenshot attached.

@BrendonKoz The problem with that option in the screenshot is that while it ungroups the taskbar items, it keeps the "text" part of it, which I don't want because it's not necessary for me and I like to have a lot of windows open so I want to conserve horizontal space. Windows 10 used to have that option, but they removed it in Windows 11. That's why you have to use this Windhawk mod I mentioned in the readme: https://windhawk.net/mods/taskbar-grouping A registry setting alone won't fix it unfortunately. Come on Microsoft!

While my plan is to switch to Linux one day (probably Omarchy), I'm still putting that (and tiling window managers) off for a bit. Let it cook a little more. In Windows 11, I like my taskbar, but one nagging thing is that it's hard to differentiate the icons of many Code/Codium instances given that I don't group them. I use both programs actually: Code for actual coding and Codium as my Markdown note taking tool (I prefer to not use Obsidian and the million other markdown editors; Code/Codium for Markdown is fantastic since you get all the developer ergonomics) With the help of AI, I developed a program with dotnet that makes it easy to add custom icon overlays effectively differentiating the program instances. This saves a lot of headache of knowing which icon corresponds to which project with a quick glance. Feel free to use it! https://github.com/jlahijani/TaskbarIconOverlay

Totally valid. However to address this they added an option in 3.2.0 so that when updating, you don't get bleeding edge packages, but instead it's lagged by 1 month: https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/releases/tag/v3.2.0 So that's comforting. Similarly, I use ProcessWire bleeding edge / dev branch, but if there have been changes in a particular week that I sense as more in-depth, especially those that touch selectors and database stuff, I usually wait another week or two to avoid potential subtle issues that are difficult to catch. I'd imagine I would use the same judgement with Omarchy.

I've settled on Omarchy! I spent a couple days getting used to Hyprland and tweaking it to my needs. It's a bit of a mind shift not having a taskbar/dock anymore, but I made it nice and easy to switch workspaces very quickly and do some basic window manipulations. It's nice having a Windows VM set up as well (I need Photoshop for work since I work with printing companies; CMYK support is a must). It's time to say goodbye to Windows!

@ryan I'd be interested to hear how you work on a project with multiple developers and manage keeping each developer's development instance in-sync. For example, are you using a migrations module like RockMigrations or writing migrations in a module specific to the site that adds/updates fields/templates/pages/settings when the module is updated using a version compare? Or are you doing something completely different? I'd be interested to hear how you handle this given that ProcessWire stores much of its configuration in the database.

Let's say you have a repeater field. ProcessWire renders it in the default ProcessWire way in the page editor, which is fine, however there are times where you may want to render a particular repeater field in a more streamlined way, like a table, while maintaining the ability for the user to make changes to field values of the respective repeater items. The problem with this however if that you must be very careful because if you do not represent a field of that repeater (and represent it correctly with the correct form "name"), then ProcessWire will wipe out the data because it expects it to exist when saving!!! This includes the "native" fields for a repeater item (which are "loaded", "sort" and "publish"). THOSE MUST ALSO BE REPRESENTED! For fields in your repeater that are hidden however, they do not need to be represented, so you can ignore rendering those. You have to be very careful here because you may one day decide to add a new field to a repeater and keep it as "Open", and forget this requirement and not add it to the your custom renderer. Then if you wrote data to the field in some way, and then a user went to edit a page that contains that repeater field and they save, your data will get wiped out!

With anything new that gets designed (a website, operating system, interface), there's always that initial cringe feeling because it's no longer familiar and comfortable, but after a couple weeks, that goes away. I'm developing a new site and using the new Konkat admin theme, which at first felt totally wrong, but now it feels just right (with 1-2 CSS tweaks, like to make repeaters jump out more). My brain is very picky about adjusting to new fonts... Inter in this case. I like the font a lot, but I just need to adjust to it, get used to the curves. Same thing with new versions of Windows when they change the default font. It's kind of like when Facebook went through a few major design changes at during the 5-10 mark and everyone would complain, then everyone got used to it. Anyway, great work. It's grown on me.

Tip: In Symfony Console, if you run code and an Exception or WireException occurs, ProcessWire will not be able to log it (and also send an adminEmail). There were cases where I was calling an undefined method on a page object and not knowing about it erroring. I used AI to work through this and ultimately it said I have to basically manage this myself because Symfony Console will catch things if I don't and never hit ProcessWire. Therefore, you may want to do something like this in your handle method: public function handle() { try { nonExistentFunction(); // purposely cause an error } catch (\Throwable $e) { // log the error $this->wire()->log->save('errors', $e->getMessage()); // consider adding additional code here to send an email notification using WireMail // ... // Re-throw so it still displays in console throw $e; } return self::SUCCESS; } I wonder if there's a more efficient way to do this? It took me too long to figure out what was happening in the first place so I haven't spent time optimizing the approach (if it's even possible).

(deleted)

Thinking about it further, I could probably go with a hybrid approach too. On my new Linux machine, I could set up a LAMP stack directly and run the projects that don't need the level of isolation DDEV provides (which is mostly all my projects) and only use DDEV for projects that would benefit from it (mainly this webapp I've been working on for the last couple years). The main point is that I want everything on one powerful development machine. My old Dell workstation is showing its age when running that webapp, although in production is pretty fast. Thanks for the insights and suggestions!

Oftentimes it's 3-5 projects at a time, with other projects being dormant or semi-dormant for a while. However there are times when I want to apply some setting across all of my sites, even the dormant ones. For example, a few years ago I decided to use SessionHandlerDB instead of the default, file-based session approach. I did this manually across all 50 sites (I suppose I could have scripted this). No need to boot up each development site with my current approach since it's all on a single LAMP server. But with Docker/DDEV, I'll have to spin up DDEV for each project then make the change, then shut it down. A little extra friction, but thinking about it as I write this, I don't think it's as bad as it sounds and I can probably automate it to some extent. How do you personally handle situations like that? If I get a Framework Desktop, I would get it with 128GB memory. It's very powerful.

I'm planning on using DDEV sometime in the next few months when I buy a new computer (most likely Framework Desktop) and hopefully switch to Linux (looking to use Omarchy). It's going to be painful in the beginning (I really REALLY don't want to give up XYplorer and I hope I can adjust to a tiling window manager way of doing things), but Omarchy is where it's at for web developers. Right now, my dev setup is pretty simple: I have a separate bare-metal server (an old Dell Xeon workstation) running Ubuntu 24.04 and a LAMP stack (mostly everything installed with apt). I have Samba setup so I can access files from my Windows desktop machine for convenience. I use VSCode Remote SSH extension to edit files directly on the server. This has served me well and is not complicated at all. All of my ProcessWire projects exist there. One thing I do to keep things as efficient as possible is symlink the 'wire' directory of all my projects to a single folder that contains the latest version of ProcessWire (I'm not using Composer to manage ProcessWire itself). Therefore, if I want to update all my sites to the latest version of ProcessWire, I just symlink that folder and all the other sites are automatically updated. Sure, that kind of goes against proper source code control practices and such, but I'm always a solo developer and the strict level of isolation of environments between sites is typically not needed for 99% of the sites I work on, which is kind of the point of Docker/DDEV, but I still want to use it. Updating ProcessWire in this way is very efficienct (at the 'expense' of a potential site breaking which is very very rare). So my question is, if I have 50 ProcessWire sites created with DDEV, can I still symlink the 'wire' folder of all of them the same way I described above without any issues? I'm very rusty with Docker but looking to embrace it heavily. Also, is it "crazy" to have 50 ProcessWire projects started all at once (will that take up a lot of resources)? With my current setup, I don't have to launch anything because it's all served by a single Apache, MariaDB and PHP which is very convenient. With DDEV, I have to launch each one individually.

Well it looks like they're switching to Laravel for Craft CMS v6: https://craftcms.com/blog/laravel This is very interesting and speaks to the idea of the CMS and web application framework powering it being 2 separate projects (Craft, etc.) vs. it being built around each other (ProcessWire). In my opinion, ProcessWire wouldn't be what we all love about it if it had such a huge dependency.

Based on driving myself completely insane with noHooks for the last 2 years, and based on what Ryan specifically said here: ... I completely agree with Ryan. noHooks option should be absolutely avoided. Seriously, if you use it in advanced cases like I have been doing, you will hit every WTF issue known to man. It is not made for developer use, even though it gives off that vibe. I think that is a mistake. I will write more about this in depth soon, but at least in my situation, my goal was to ultimately update a page and all of its descendant repeaters (repeaters within repeaters) only after the page is its descendant repeaters have been saved completely first without hook interference. Using noHooks basically fucks up everything up (saying it's been frustrating dealing with it is an understatement) and there are unintended consequences everywhere! The correct way to do what I described is to do something like this, which took forever to figure out (every line has a specific reasoning behind it): // // /site/classes/OrderPage.php // class OrderPage extends Page { public function getAggregateRootPage() { return $this; } public function finalize() { // your code to finalize the page, such as populating an order_total field, etc. } } // // /site/classes/OrderLineItemsRepeaterPage.php // class OrderLineItemsRepeaterPage extends RepeaterPage { public function getAggregateRootPage() { return $this->getForPage(); } } // // /site/init.php or /site/ready.php (doesn't matter) // wire()->set('finishedPages', new PageArray()); // hook 1: use Pages::saved only to build list of pages to finalize wire()->set('finishedPagesHook', wire()->addHookAfter('Pages::saved', function(HookEvent $event) { $page = $event->arguments('page'); if(!method_exists($page, 'getAggregateRootPage')) return; wire('finishedPages')->add($page->getAggregateRootPage()); // duplicated pages won't get stored }, [ 'priority' => 1000 ]); // hook 2: use ProcessWire::finished to finalize the pages 🤌 wire()->addHookBefore('ProcessWire::finished', function(HookEvent $event) { wire()->removeHook(wire('finishedPagesHook')); foreach(wire('finishedPages') as $finishedPage) { $finishedPage->finalize(); } }, [ 'priority' => 1001 ]); When I demo my system one day which is way more complicated than the example code above, it will become clear. // TLDR: don't use noHooks when saving a page. DON'T! Instead, create a log of what pages need to be finalized, and act on those pages in ProcessWire::finished hook, which is when you can be absolutely sure the coast is clear. I wish I knew about that hook earlier. If you follow those simple rules, you don't have to think about CLI vs non-cli, ajax vs. non-ajax, whether the current page process implements WirePageEditor, uncache, getFresh, saved vs. saveReady, before vs. after hook, hook priority, editing a repeater on a page vs. editing the repeater "directly", where the hook should go (it should be in init.php/ready.php or in the init()/ready() method of a module), etc. Note: there's a whole other aspect to this in terms of locking the a page to prevent multiple saves (like if a page was being saved by an automated script and the same page was being saved by an editor in the GUI).

Awesome. I use BunnyCDN as well (previously KeyCDN) configured with ProCache, mainly because they publish the list of IPs they use if their edge-servers need to pull assets (and then serve) from your website. While this post isn't directly related to your module, it matters if you are using WireRequestBlocker for the reasons I explained here (post only viewable if you have access). Long story short, if a CDN makes a request to a URL on your site that matches a blocking rule in WireRequestBlocker (rare, but it's bound to happen by accident) then the IP of that particular BunnyCDN edge-server will get blocked. Then if a visitor on your site is being sent assets from that edge server, then it will error because the CDN was never able to obtain it due to the edge-server being blocked. This is why the site might look fine in California, but broken in New York for example, as the user is being sent assets from different edge-servers. To prevent this from happening, I have a cronjob set up (runs every 24 hours) to grab the list of BunnyCDN edge-server IPs and I insert it into WireRequestBlockers "IP addresses to whitelist" field. This is a function that can do what I described above: function bunnycdnWhitelistIps() { if(!wire('modules')->isInstalled('WireRequestBlocker')) return false; // Fetch BunnyCDN edge server list $url = 'https://bunnycdn.com/api/system/edgeserverlist'; // Use cURL to fetch the content $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 30); $response = curl_exec($ch); $httpCode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE); curl_close($ch); if($httpCode !== 200 || $response === false) { throw new WireException("Error fetching data from BunnyCDN API. HTTP Code: $httpCode\n"); } // Parse the JSON response $data = json_decode($response, true); if(json_last_error() !== JSON_ERROR_NONE) { throw new WireException("Invalid IPs."); } // Extract IP addresses into an array $ipAddresses = []; if(isset($data) && is_array($data)) { foreach($data as $ip) { if(filter_var($ip, FILTER_VALIDATE_IP)) { $ipAddresses[] = $ip; } } } // Remove duplicates and sort $ipAddresses = array_unique($ipAddresses); sort($ipAddresses); $data = wire('modules')->getModuleConfigData('WireRequestBlocker'); $data['goodIps'] = implode("\n", $ipAddresses); wire('modules')->saveModuleConfigData('WireRequestBlocker', $data); }