Digit v2.6 Deployment: Deploying on local VM (hurdles, solutions & suggestions)

[subhashini-egov]

Attempted quick start deploy of Digit v 2.6 on Macbook Air, Apple M1, 8 cores, 16GB RAM and 500 GB SDD. Although I was able to finally get Digit installed successfully, pods are always in "init" state. Some pods are in ImagePullBackoff state. I was told this could be due to resource constraints. Below are some observations/suggestions from this experiment:

1. Overall, most of the documentation is in place. Re-arranging them in some places, providing easy format options and providing more detail will make it easy for a newbie to install.
2. Example of formatting issue below. Provide copy area only to command, not to output as well. There are other places also like this.

3. Have a Troubleshooting or FAQ section in the docs also before pointing to discussion board.This can be a collection distilled from the Q&A boards for some common issues. 4. The H/W requirements have to be validated. I have a M1 Mac with 8 cores, 16 GB RAM and 500 GB HDD. Per H/w requirements, this should work just fine. Installation went well but when starting services, most of them were in "init" state. Maybe a simple script that will check H/w and confirm whether installation can proceed or not would be good. 5. Have a prerequisite list per OS type with clearly listed versions of each tool. Eg. Docker, kubectl and k3d don't have specific versions listed under the Mac installation section. 6. Instruction to install k3d on Mac is not right. There is no k3dCopied! package. Potential spello here. The correct installation via Homebrew is: brew install k3d@4.0.0 7. Some of the tools such as k3d have specific versions listed for Windows but those versions are not valid for the Mac. I installed k3d 4.0.0 and kubectl 1.22 using Homebrew and this worked for me. 8. Adding Go to the path should be documented for Mac/Windows/Linux clearly. This may be overlooked easily (as I did). 9. Docker needs to have Kubernetes cluster enabled. Providing exact instructions on how to do this in the doc will make it easier for a Docker/Kubernetes newbie to try. I overlooked the k3s enablement on the first pass. Also, providing any specific resource (RAM) allocation to containers should be documented. 10. Deployment script - the questions documented are different from the actual questions on screen.

Questions in the documentation:

Actual screen:

11. Module selection is confusing from a UX standpoint. I select m_PublicGrievanceRedressal and I would expect to go to the next step. But I have to again select "Exit" and only then installation moves on. Modify script to move onto the next step perhaps?
12. Discourage use of local install on Mac with M1 chip or local installs in general since all services cannot be realistically run on a local machine. While installation might be experimental, running it is not feasible. Installation does not prove anything unless we can also validate it by running it. Or..
13. Maybe provide a light-weight Digit to install and verify a few services locally so it'll be helpful for validation/PoC instead of all the core services? Is this feasible?