First Time with Filament

I had a heck of a time trying to get my first experiment with Filament working, i.e. the professional dashboard tool I want to use. In theory, it should have been very easy to add it to my Hello World project, but things never go smoothly, eh?

Wrong PHP version

First of all, I got errors installing Filament from the command line because of a PHP version mismatch. Even though I'd updated my server to PHP 8.3, the "path" in the background of my computer was still pointing to an older version. It's a classic case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.

When I finally got it working, I was surprised by how slow it was to load in the browser. Gemini told me to enable something called the OPcache.

The "Export Context" button

I made a component to add to the dashboard which would take all the code and glue it together into a single text file. I made it so I could easily show Gemini all of my code and get its professional opinion. The problem was, the button wouldn't show on the dashboard. I spent ages trying various things to get it to appear, but no luck. Can you guess what the problem was? Of course, it was the OPcache! I had to disable it again so the screen would refresh and show my button.

Fighting with VSCode

I would have solved that OPcache problem much sooner if I wasn't fighting with my code editor. For some reason, it wouldn't let me save files that had errors in them, even though the errors weren't errors. I even had to pull out Notepad++ just to bypass the silliness of it all.

In the end, the solution was to go into the settings and manually point VSCode at the right PHP path. That did the trick, and after two hours of faffing around, I finally had a Filament dashboard with a custom button to export my code in a ready-for-AI state. Success at last.

Why am I telling you this?

Although it was frustrating, I'm well aware that this is exactly the job I'm preparing myself for. As a consultant, I'm the one who will find the problem, untangle the cables and fix the mess. Whether you run a yoga studio or you're the office manager for a plumbing firm, you have better things to do than deal with silly technical issues like these. I, on the other hand, quite enjoy overcoming these challenges. :)