[Chore] Consolidating application settings and environment variables

[alexjustesen]

Important

TL;DR: Settings page is going away and will be replaced with environment variables.

📃 Description

Currently settings and application configuration are bifurcated between the UI and environment variables. This inconsistency has caused confusion on where to update a setting or configuration for a feature or function. UI based settings, specifically with the spatie/laravel-settings package, also have been the cause of several stability issues over the release history (i.e. #1226).

After thinking about this change for a couple of weeks I have decided I'm going to remove UI based settings where applicable in favor of configurations defined with environment variables.

A side benefit to this will be the removal of the settings table and less queries to the database for settings values. While a small benefit, less is always more.

Also could argue better GitOps, configuration as code, insert more buzzwords here.

✅ Completed work

• [Chore] Deprecate general settings site name #1332
• [Chore] Deprecate general settings public dashboard #1333
• [Feature] Removed general settings page (BREAKING CHANGE) #1464

✅ To-do list

• Identify each UI general setting that should be moved to an environment variable.
• Add those configuration options to config/app.php or config/speedtest.php.
• Update documentation with a complete list of configuration / environment variables. https://docs.speedtest-tracker.dev/getting-started/environment-variables

🤔 Confusion

• Site name exists in the UI and APP_NAME exists as an environment variable. They both affect different areas of the application. closed [Chore] Deprecate general settings site name #1332

[etofi]

I use the new image and also have the both environment variables in the docker command.

-e APP_NAME="Speedtest Tracker Eric" \
-e PUBLIC_DASHBOARD=true \

but i still get this message in the "General" settings

Site name
⚠️ DEPRECATED: Use APP_NAME environment variable.
Public dashboard
⚠️ DEPRECATED: Use PUBLIC_DASHBOARD environment variable. 

[alexjustesen]

but i still get this message in the "General" settings

Site name
⚠️ DEPRECATED: Use APP_NAME environment variable.
Public dashboard
⚠️ DEPRECATED: Use PUBLIC_DASHBOARD environment variable. 

Yep, you can ignore that if you're using the environment variables.