Lemmy checks the environment variable before the configuration file;
i.e. if the file is used to configure the database but the environment
variable is set to anything, the connection will fail because it'll
ignore the file. This was the previous behavior.
Now, the environment variable will be unset unless the user explicitly
chooses to set it, which makes the file-based configuration function
correctly. It's also possible to manually set the environment variable,
which has the major advantage of working around [this issue][0], which
prevents certain setups from working.
[0]: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2945
Part of #229910.
Unfortunately this is a little hacky because upstream doesn't intend to
support it for 2.5, but only for 3.0 which isn't out yet, however nodejs-16
will get out of maintenance during the support-span of NixOS 23.05[1].
The only breaking change is that `extract-files` uses a deprecated way
of exposing modules, I went through the list of other breaking
changes in v17 and v18[2][3] and couldn't spot any usage of removed
features, also local testing didn't reveal further issues.
Unfortunately fixing that breakage turned out to be non-trivial.
Currently, `extract-files@9.0.0` is used with the problematic portions
in its `package.json`, however it's only a transitive dependency of
`@graphql-tools/url-loader` & `apollo-upload-client`. Unfortunately, the
versions of that in use require v9 and don't work with a newer version of
`extract-files` with the problem fixed[4]. Also, upgrading the
dependencies in question is not a feasible option because `graphql-tools`
was split up into multiple smaller packages in v8 and also some of the
APIs in use in `wiki.js` were dropped there[5], so this would also be
very time-consuming and non-trivial to fix.
Since this was the only issue, I decided to go down the hacky route and
patch the problem in `package.json` of `extract-files` manually during
our `patchPhase`.
[1] https://github.com/requarks/wiki/discussions/6388
[2] https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v17.0.0
[3] https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v18.0.0
[4] Upon local testing, this broke with the following error:
Error [ERR_PACKAGE_PATH_NOT_EXPORTED]: Package subpath './public/extractFiles' is not defined by "exports" in /wiki/node_modules/extract-files/package.json
[5] For instance `SchemaDirectiveVisitor` in
`server/graph/directives/auth`.
