module ProcessWireReset

[Mikel]

Hi all,

a small confession from the frameless corner of the PW universe: in the last 15 years we've spent way too many evenings doing the same FTP-shuffle on shared hosting. Delete everything in site/, drop the DB via phpMyAdmin, re-upload, run install.php, log back in, find out the bug we were chasing only reproduces after a reset, sigh, repeat.

The reason we do this on real hosting at all is that the gnarly bugs in modules-under-development never show up locally — AllowOverride, mixed file ownership, mod_security, you know the drill. But "let's test cleanly on the real server" and "no SSH access" don't combine well.

So we built ProcessWireReset: a module that wipes a PW install back to clean profile state from inside the admin. No SSH, no FTP, no phpMyAdmin. Click the button, log back in, you're at a freshly installed PW with your superuser intact and any modules you marked as keep re-installed automatically.

A few things worth knowing, since destructive modules deserve some care:

• Modules to keep + Directories to keep. Two fields in the config: one picks which modules survive (transitive dependencies included), the other is a free-form list of paths under site/ that should be spared by the cleanup — handy for things like templates/RockIcons or assets/backups that live outside the module directories.
• Custom tables go into a snapshot. After the reset you can pick which module-specific tables to restore. Auto-restoring everything turned out to fight with re-installed schemas more often than we liked.
• The reset can crash mid-way — a kept module's install() can fatal in surprising ways. The confirmation modal hands you a one-time recovery URL with a 256-bit token. If the worst happens, that URL gives you a clean reinstall with your original credentials. Belt, braces, and one extra strap.
• It's interactive only. No cron triggers, no CI hooks. The destructive button has a real human in front of it, on purpose.

Pairs nicely with GitSync: If you're already using our GitSync module, ProcessWireReset is the missing other half. GitSync pulls a fresh module version from your GitHub repo into the live install at the click of a button — but it doesn't touch the DB or re-run install(). After a GitSync pull that changed schemas, fields, or admin pages, the previous install state and the new code drift apart. Hit Reset, the module is removed and re-installed cleanly from the freshly pulled code, and you're testing what you actually shipped instead of a frankenstein of old DB state and new files. That GitSync → Reset → test loop is what we use daily on shared-hosting test installs where SSH isn't an option.

Repo (MIT): https://github.com/frameless-at/ProcessWireReset
Modules Directory: https://processwire.com/modules/process-wire-reset

Caveat the obvious: this thing is for development, not for production. Treat it accordingly.
Curious to hear what you build/break with it. Bug reports and pull requests welcome.

Cheers,
Mike