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[Bug]: Herd does not work within a Windows domain controlled environment

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#601 19 comments 11 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
php, powershell
Domain
developer-experience, operating-systems, tooling

Research direction

Start by reproducing the installation on a non-administrator Windows 11 user account in a Windows domain-managed environment. Investigate the installer and application behavior, PATH setup, site creation and Sites UI, and repeated PowerShell elevation described in the report. Done means the listed failures are addressed or individually narrowed to actionable issues.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

windows
Platform

Windows

Operating system version

Windows 11 Pro - 23H2, Build 22631.3374

System architecture

Windows

Herd Version

1.0.1

PHP Version

No response

Bug description

We purchased a Herd Pro Teams licence to try and migrate more of our team to using local development, however, our users have found many major issues in trying to run Herd in our Windows environment. The most likely cause given there doesn't appear to be open issues reporting any of our issues is that all our users are non-administrator users which are managed inside a Windows domain-managed (syncing with our local domain controller).

Even when running the Herd installer and application with elevated Admin permissions we still get many problems, I'll list what we've discovered so far below but this isn't exhaustive as so much isn't working:

  • App isn't set to be run as administrator by default - you have to remember to right click and launch as admin each time
  • None of the binaries are added to the Windows path, meaning php, herd, composer ... commands don't work
  • Unable to add a site, UI shows, but when you add it says successful, but no files get created
  • When trying to load the Sites UI after attempting to add a site, it just infinitely loads/spins
  • Annoyance: Each power shell command you run, we have to type in admin credentials to escalate. Most tasks (adding services, securing sites (we manually got this working eventually)....) run many separate commands meaning we have to type in admin credentials over and over (just getting Heard installed with MySQL and Redis took > 10 privilege escalations, securing a single Site took 6!).
Steps to reproduce

Install on a Windows user (non-admin) account within a Windows domain-managed environment

Relevant log output

No response

Dominant language
No language data
Stars
123
Forks
1
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Getting set up

This project ships no dev container, Dockerfile or contributing guide, so setting up is up to you: start from its README, and see our first-contribution guide for the general steps.

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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