Dear Linode,

I tried installing Drupal using the Linode Marketplace. I got it working quickly, and it definitely saves typing, time, and expertise, compared to having to set it up manually.

I was happy to see it was built on Debian 10, which is the rock that Ubuntu builds on. Having used the installation for several days, I have a few suggestions:

1. Drupal needs a mail server. Can you offer to setup one up, perhaps leveraging code from other scripts?
2. The Create process was easy, but slightly more complicated than necessary because I had to go read the documentation. If you can please explain in the user interface that the database user account will be called “drupal” and the database will be called “drupaldb”, since these are necessary for the Drupal web installation. It shouldn’t be required to read any docs when you’ve built such a nice UI, and that was the only information missing. Note, if you call them both “drupal”, I would have guessed correctly 😉

I’m happy it’s running the latest version of Drupal, but I’m not sure what the process would be to update it to new versions, and the documentation doesn’t say. Perhaps I would just do a backup and restore to another Linode script, however that seems a overkill for a bug fix. Can you put some information about this in the documentation since Drupal isn’t in the Debian archive?

Also, have you heard of PHP Composer? It provides a mechanism to keep up to date with new versions for Drupal as well as the plugins. If you set Drupal up via the Composer, you will give them a better system regarding future installation of updates, as well as avoiding needing to setup an FTP server.

I would also consider making your Marketplace use Ansible, which allows the users to install additional apps on one machine, support multiple distros, handle upgrades over time, and has other cool features. I think it would take one Ansible person about 6 months to get your marketplace scripts ported over. I don’t even know Ansible, but I could get a WordPress script ported in a week or so 😉

I’m a fan of Linode for many reasons, but one of them is that you make it so easy to run Arch Linux, by saving me the only hard part — the installation process. Anyone who says Arch isn’t good for servers probably hasn’t tried in the last 5 years. I hope any of this is food for thought.