This seems to be where the installation gets stuck on Ubuntu (22.04 LTS)

[danielrosehill]

Seems to work okay until this point (running: python -m mathesar.install --skip-confirm | tee /tmp/install.py.log).

Yields output:

One suggested point of feedback about the installation guide for Linux, also - it might be worth mentioning that Caddy needs to be installed (obviously) before editing the Caddyfile as users may assume that it's in their distro's repos and they are just doing something wrong.

My installation seemed to go okay minus that output, but unfortunately there's no sign of Mathesar running on port 8000 (or any port at all):

[hitenvidhani]

@danielrosehill can you try killing postgres services(if that doesn't affect other apps) and run the command again?

[Anish9901]

Hi @danielrosehill, I suspect the TypeError you are encountering could be caused by using an unsupported version of Python, we currently support Python 3.9 through 3.11.

One suggested point of feedback about the installation guide for Linux, also - it might be worth mentioning that Caddy needs to be installed (obviously) before editing the Caddyfile as users may assume that it's in their distro's repos and they are just doing something wrong.

Thanks for the suggestion! I'd like to inform you that we already have it documented in the software section of the guide. If you have any further questions or need clarification, please feel free to ask. Your feedback is valuable to us!

[seancolsen]

I'm triaging this issue and I just want to chime in so we're clear about the next steps here...

From what I can tell, @danielrosehill you have two problems:

1. You're running Python 3.8 and didn't understand that Mathesar can't support that Python version.
2. You didn't understand that Caddy needs to be installed before installing Mathesar.

Is that accurate, @danielrosehill?

If so, can you tell us:

• Why are you running Python 3.8? We didn't expect this to be common. What distro are you on? Is it easy for you to upgrade your Python version? If not, why? Perhaps Python 3.8 is more common than we thought. If so, we could evaluate the feasibility of extending support for it. However I'll say up front that my hunch is that supporting Python 3.8 would probably not be easy.

• Did you see the "Software" section at the top of the installation documentation that mentions the requirements for Python versions and for Caddy? Is there a way that we can improve this documentation to make it clearer for readers?

• Why did you chose "Install from scratch" instead of "Install using Docker Compose". I'm curious. We have been expecting most people to install via Docker Compose which is why we haven't put quite as much polish into the "from scratch" method. We could consider adding polish by (for example) checking the Python version before installing. But thus far we've chosen to focus our precious time elsewhere. Understanding more about your rationale for choosing "from scratch" might help sway us towards polishing that installation flow further.

We're working hard to make the installation process easy overall, and we really appreciate the time you've taken to open a issue!

If we don't hear anything else here in a couple weeks we'll close this issue.

Or if we can help us come up with some other ideas for how to improve things, we're open to taking other actions too.