A few days ago Aaron Lee e-mail me with a problem that he is experiencing with Orchestra Platform and I see that this is a common painfall that any extension developer would experience while developing for Orchestra Platform.

Hi,

Let me just say that i love Orchestra. However, I'm facing a bit of trouble. I tried to set up a new extension, but if i make a mistake and I activate the extension, Im getting a ton of error.

Most of the time i had to reinstall the database. Thats very troublesome.

Update our dependencies

Before we start this tutorial, let's begin by updating playground dependencies, there's tonne of update has been push since we last used it.

$ cd playground
$ composer update --dev

This is important as orchestra/extension v2.0.8 and orchestra/foundation v2.0.11 added some cool improvement to debugging corrupted extension.

Now let create a mistake

Open up app/orchestra.php and add this line:

<?php

throw new Exception("I broke you!");

What happen if we visit http://localhost:8000/admin/extensions?

Use Safe Mode

So what should you do? There a way for you to run Orchestra Platform in safe mode (where extension is not booted at all). To run this simply append ?safe_mode=on from any page (e.g: http://localhost:8000/admin/extensions?safe_mode=on).

Now you can safely deactivate playground extension by clicking on the deactivate button, problem solved.

Revert to Normal Mode

To reset back to normal mode, all you need to do is append ?safe_mode=off and you're done (e.g: http://localhost:8000/admin/extensions?safe_mode=off).