I'm having trouble understanding the docs. Either I'm missing something or there are some serious gaps in there. I'll gladly contribute to them once I've figured this out.
The installation page tells you that you can use docker, install manually via the binary, or even compile it yourself from sources. I don't like docker, so I went with the binary. After wrestling with it for several hours I finally realized that there is no installation, as the "installation" page would have you believe. You just run the server via the binary every time, with a systemd service being the closest thing you get to an installation. Alright cool.
The "Setup on your website"/frontend config is where things get insane.
YOUR_SITE_ID - the SITE that you passed to Remark42 instance on start, remark by default.
What? What site that I passed to the remark42 instance on start? I never passed anything. On start, I only passed the url and the secret (oh yeah, I also had to pass a port directive because for some reason --url=https://127.0.0.1:1234 just makes way too much sense to actually work).
Additionally for the frontend section, images in the docs would be tremendously helpful since all of this is essentially visual differences that mean nothing to me when I'm first setting it up and being met with all these parameters.
The reverse proxy was another headache. There are ready to deploy vhosts for some of the most obscure servers, but not Apache? I figured that out eventually though. But the unclear instructions and having to figure everything out for yourself leaves way too much room for error making troubleshooting a nightmare. I can't ever trust that until "this" point I did things by the book and everything should work perfectly.
The backend configuration page is by far the worst though. The entire page is dedicated to docker compose with absolutely no mention to any of the other installation methods. Even though the first installation page would completely have you believing that binary and even compilation are also supported.
Now I have a working comments widget that cannot be used to post comments, not even anonymously (speaking of which, why does one need to "log in" anonymously?). I'm not even interested in using any oAuth providers, but I can't even use anonymous "login" apparently without setting it up somehow and passing some configuration to something despite the complete lack of configuration files and information on how any of this works.
The secret set in the command that starts the server also doesn't seem to be corroborated anywhere else and seems to be entirely meaningless.
And that's just the parts of the documentation I've gone through so far trying to get it working. I can't imagine what extending it and trying to modify it would be like. I'm very surprised how bad the docs are considering how popular this is, and that I've known about it for at least a year now.
Anyway, any help would be appreciated. And like I said, I'll gladly contribute to the docs once I have a better understanding of how this all works but right now I can't even get it working.
umputun
commented
1 month ago
I'm having trouble understanding the docs. Either I'm missing something or there are some serious gaps in there. I'll gladly contribute to them once I've figured this out.
The installation page tells you that you can use docker, install manually via the binary, or even compile it yourself from sources. I don't like docker, so I went with the binary. After wrestling with it for several hours I finally realized that there is no installation, as the "installation" page would have you believe. You just run the server via the binary every time, with a systemd service being the closest thing you get to an installation. Alright cool.
The "Setup on your website"/frontend config is where things get insane.
YOUR_SITE_ID - the SITE that you passed to Remark42 instance on start, remark by default.What? What site that I passed to the remark42 instance on start? I never passed anything. On start, I only passed the url and the secret (oh yeah, I also had to pass a port directive because for some reason --url=https://127.0.0.1:1234 just makes way too much sense to actually work).Additionally for the frontend section, images in the docs would be tremendously helpful since all of this is essentially visual differences that mean nothing to me when I'm first setting it up and being met with all these parameters.
The reverse proxy was another headache. There are ready to deploy vhosts for some of the most obscure servers, but not Apache? I figured that out eventually though. But the unclear instructions and having to figure everything out for yourself leaves way too much room for error making troubleshooting a nightmare. I can't ever trust that until "this" point I did things by the book and everything should work perfectly.
The backend configuration page is by far the worst though. The entire page is dedicated to docker compose with absolutely no mention to any of the other installation methods. Even though the first installation page would completely have you believing that binary and even compilation are also supported.
Now I have a working comments widget that cannot be used to post comments, not even anonymously (speaking of which, why does one need to "log in" anonymously?). I'm not even interested in using any oAuth providers, but I can't even use anonymous "login" apparently without setting it up somehow and passing some configuration to something despite the complete lack of configuration files and information on how any of this works.
The secret set in the command that starts the server also doesn't seem to be corroborated anywhere else and seems to be entirely meaningless.
And that's just the parts of the documentation I've gone through so far trying to get it working. I can't imagine what extending it and trying to modify it would be like. I'm very surprised how bad the docs are considering how popular this is, and that I've known about it for at least a year now.
Anyway, any help would be appreciated. And like I said, I'll gladly contribute to the docs once I have a better understanding of how this all works but right now I can't even get it working.