php install script help only available after installation

[nyov]

The README (Running the Magento 2 installer) says

Before you begin, you can run the following commands to find values for some required options:
php -f index.php help languages [...]

These actually only produce results after an installation, aside from failing without any helpful error messages (Reason for failure: Invalid arguments or no arguments provided), which almost had me thinking the installer was broken there for a while.

What made matters worse for me, the script will always "silently" fail, if run from inside the setup directory, while the README explicitely states

You must install Magento from its setup subdirectory.

The above mentioned README lines should really read something like php -f setup/index.php help languages, and fix the notice to say that the script is supposed to be run from the magento root directory.
Unless this is a temporary hiccup and supposed to work differently later.
(version tested 0.1.0-alpha106 / e05a60c)

Thanks

[alankent]

Hi. Why do you believe the script always silently fails if run from within the setup directly? If you have a look at https://github.com/alankent/docker-magento2-demo-apache/tree/master/scripts you will see the scripts I use to create a Docker image. This does a cd into the setup directory, and after I created the image the installation worked. So I was wondering if you could provide a bit more detail about what behavior you observed. Thanks!

Thanks for the other feedback on the error message and sequence of commands in documentation that might not be quite right.

[nyov]

Well, this is typical. Trying to retrace the steps... Now it works.
I can only guess this must have been a permission problem previously where I set them too strict/wrong and the script didn't find some includes. Can't figure it out anymore.

And the other issue actually seems to be a mis-spelling thing I tripped over: php -f index.php help languages|timezones|currencies in the README should be

php -f index.php help language
php -f index.php help currency
php -f index.php help timezone

That's the syntax the tool's help actually mentions, so I must have copy-pasted it from the readme :/

Very sorry, all my fault!

[nyov]

I'll close this, as fixing the readme is probably not quite an important priority at this time.

[alankent]

Thanks. We will review the README as well. It is important (to me anyway). It should also be easy! ;-)

FWIW, added a note here: http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v1.0/install-gde/install/install-cli.html#instgde-install-cli-first