UI to edit advanced settings

Feature Requests
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1

PhotoStructure has a ton of settings, but only 5 of them are currently editable via the settings page.

These are currently configurable by editing a text file or setting environment variables, but
it’d be more convenient if there was an actual “advanced settings” page in the UI.

Thanks for the suggestion, @LaurensBot!

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Even if there was a text box that allowed you to put “additional settings” using identical syntax as the settings.toml file, that would be super helpful!

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Just coming back to this request after getting the alpha up and running…

Let’s say you ask me “Is your logging set to info or debug?” Currently, the only way to answer that question is to search your settings.toml file for “logLevel” and see what you have set. But there are two settings.toml files, so you have to guess which one it’s in. And maybe I don’t know that the setting is called “logLevel”, so instead I just search for “log” and have to click through results like “catalog” and “logo” and “logic” before finally finding the logLevel.

There must be a better way! I’d like to propose, if it’s easier than building a UI for editing settings, that you provide a read-only page with a table consisting of the following columns:

  • Setting Name
  • Setting Value
  • Does setting value differ from default value?
  • Setting location (which settings.toml file, or environment variable)

This would make it SO MUCH EASIER to answer questions about settings, and because the location of the setting is provided, you know exactly where to go to change a setting as well.

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totally agreed!

I’ve been postponing settings UI improvements until I add user auth, because dangerous settings (like enableArchive, enableDelete, and enableEmptyTrash) shouldn’t be available to the UI as it currently stands.

But the settings themselves were designed to be rendered to the user: it’s why there’s so much metadata already on them (they’re in categories, have descriptions, and even have input validation: it’s just waiting for user auth!)

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Not knowing how far away we are from user authentication, what do you think about adding a read-only settings overview like I described? As long as the settings aren’t editable, then nobody can change them without access to the host environment.

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The read-only settings page is a great idea.

As an immediate solution, did you know that you could shell into your docker container and run ./photostructure info --filter nonDefaultSettings? That lists all non-default setting values. Holler if you need help with that.

(./photostructure info has a ton of other possibly-interesting information, like all expanded directories, health checks, … run with --help for even more goodies).