Request for CONTRIBUTING guide for non-PHP devs

[LoveIsGrief]

I've written code in a fair few languages, but PHP is new to me. CONTRIBUTING.md is written from the perspective of an experience PHP dev, which makes it difficult for newcomers like me to contribute.

What it could add:

• How to setup a development environment (is docker for production only?)
• Which components there are, what they do, how they interact
  • What's caddy and why is there reverse proxy required in front of caddy?
  • mercure?
  • messenger?
  • What's PHPFPM (or whatever it's called)
• Which env vars are there and what do they do? Values for dev and prod?
• How to do do other common tasks like
  • starting a debugger (I assume there's something like gdb or pdb or something for PHP?)
  • linting
  • running tests
  • seeing applied changes (is hot reload a thing in PHP?)
  • connecting the app to a database
  • building a production image

I'd love to introduce something like devenv or devbox or nix-shell and package this for nix, but tbh, I'm lost.

[e-five256]

I think our dev documentation is a bit split in multiple places right now. For instance, there is: https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin#developers

as well as the bare metal and docker guides. When I set up my dev env originally, I just followed the docker guide, but I can see things not being completely clear, and anything you can suggest to improve on it is appreciated.

I do think a visual flowchart of the cluster / systems would help, I'm not sure about other people but I tend to learn better with imagery over words, perhaps that's something I can work on to at least try to make a bit clearer the moving pieces of the site / db / queues

edit: also check out https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/blob/main/FAQ.md which has some answers to the questions you asked like what is mercure. perhaps we could expand on that with a few more

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