I have ran in this issue on a couple test servers and I get stuck at this particular spot each time. If I try to push past this the whole installation gets botched. Something happens with the modules installed and I think they just “go away”. haha.
In short, I’m trying to install this. I have redis and varnish installed. composer require/scandipwa and then clear the cache, magento c:c, then run the magento setup:upgrade and I’m slapped in the face with a red box saying redis is not configured for persistent queries. This is probably very obvious with the documentation for someone with more experience, however not so much for me. It was a good opportunity for me to test the restore option in DO.
Install Guide for this: https://github.com/scandipwa/installer
In the meantime, I will be trying to find the solution myself.
I’ve not done much digging into Magento/PWA. The development community states that the Magento PWA isn’t quite there yet - Therefore, I benched any PWA research/adoption until at least 2021.
This might be the reason why I’m not familiar with ScandiPWA.
If I get a bit of free time this week, I’ll run through the installation process on my sandbox server and see what issues I run into. Having looked at the GitHub Readme, don’t expect me to have an easier time than you’ve had so far 
I would certainly have to agree with you on that. Since I about 100% certain PWA will be the way to go soon, I am trying to basically do a proof of concept on all of these server setups. I want to get PWA installed, if it can be installed due to dependencies and access to files/configs etc… This will also help me choose which server setup I will go with. I don’t know that I will actually use the PWA right now because I am not sure that it would ready or easily flexible enough (for me) for what I would need. I don’t have many “special requirements” at all as far as store customizations. The biggest one for me is the menus. We have lots of categories due to the nature of our products.
From my research on all PWA solutions out there, ScandiPWA seems by far and away the best right now. Yes, venia is magento’s pwa, however it is also more of a proof of concept rather than something that is meant to be used out of the box. I think they may be starting to take it that way a little, but not really the main focus. Other solutions require other dependencies that aren’t typically in the M2 stack. ScandiPWA not only does extremely well on performance, but it relies on the M2 stack and what adobe has built for pwa studio. To me, the choice becomes obvious. I’m sure in 3-5 years that’s all we will see, PWA.
I was able to successfully install it on DO. I haven’t activated the theme yet, but it is all there. I had to use their persisted query module, enable it, and instead of manually configuring the env.php I used the setup:config:set I ran this before to set the parameters, however I got an error that one of the options they specified wasn’t available. I didn’t think that it was dependent on the persisted query module they had. It just hit me this morning to try all of that in one “fell swoop”. It worked. It placed the configuration in a different location in the env. that is literally the only difference I could see as I had the same config even after utilizing their persisted query option and it still wouldn’t work. On to smooth sailing until the next problem arises.
This success though tells me that I should be able to install this on any server running redis and varnish. Pretty much all the settings had to do with the env.php file. Unless there was some strange configuration in the “managed” servers’ varnish or redis confs then I think it should work. I’m going to work on the DO server with this installed a little before heading over to cloudways to try.