Help talk:Toolforge/Quickstart

Critics to this Quickstart guide

• Hello. I'm a newbie at Labs and Toolforge, had never head about those Kubernets, Grid, Bastion and other things very new for me. But I dealed a little with Docker containers, and I used SSH a lot (not from Putty, but on Ubuntu), and I developed and supported a couple of PHP (LAMP) web sites built using PHP frameworks (as an an amateur). I'm not a professional web-developer (but I'm a professional software developer working in a large company, with experience in C++, Java, Python - I'm fine with tech). And I come here to build and launch a new web tool, required for my Wikipedia bot, and may be it would be helpful for anyone else. I registered on Labs and created SSH keys long ago and recently come back here again with this clear objective. I navigated and read a lot of wiki pages and subpages about Toolforge, Kubernets, Toolforge/Web, Python (because I want to create Python-based tool), Version control, Gerrit, etc. And, as a result, all those peaces of information I read are now messed up in my head and I still don't know what to do to launch my first service, and what does that "webservice start" command do, and how is this Kubernets and Bastion are related to my new webservice, and what is a place that I get into, when I do SSH at "tools-login.toolforge.org" or "tools-dev.toolforge.org". And what is a difference between "tools-dev" and "tools-login" (this Q arises when you're reading Help:Access to Toolforge instances with PuTTY and WinSCP). And why " manage files in Toolforge" link tells how to "take ownership"? In my new service there's no files at all. And why have to do "become <tool>"? This "Quickstart" guide is fine, I passed all 6 steps, but what is next? I stuck at that 6th step. This is "Quickstart" to what? I couldn't find a step-by-step guide, where you understand what you are doing, until I found Help:Toolforge/My_first_Flask_OAuth_tool. That is kind of a step-by-step guide and it is nice. But this is about Flask. This is not the place where you expect to learn basics. I need something universal, it may be fine to have a guide for the most default case - lighttpd/PHP as an example. So, why am I complaining here? I'll try to add more information, more links to relevant pages, to make learning process smooth and for newbies like me to find a straight path to what you want instead of long wandering in labyrinth. I hope you don't mind it, don't ban me for that, fix my mistakes, and comment me if I do something wrong. Nirvanchik (talk) 21:11, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

SSH quickstart for linux and MacOS?

The "Getting started with Toolforge - Quickstart" section step 6. only links to connection through putty and winscp. What if the newbie is using linux or MacOS, or even WSL and ssh from windows? chicocvenancio (talk) 21:12, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

Question about logging in with SSH

Thanks for this guide! I was able to get started with Toolforge quickly and easily, and create my first tool. I have a question about logging in with SSH that is related to chicocvenancio's question above: Is step 6 under "Getting started with Toolforge - Quickstart" required? I skipped this during my tool setup and everything seemed to work just by running ssh login.toolforge.org. Is there a reason not to include that command on this guide? If not, I'm happy to add it. --Alex Paskulin (talk) 12:59, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

The first link in steps 6 to Help:Access to Toolforge instances with PuTTY and WinSCP is very Microsoft Windows specific (and maybe even legacy versions of Windows specific). The second link to Portal:Toolforge/Tool Accounts#Manage_files_in_Toolforge should be more agnostic of the user's local OS, although I see it also has some sections focusing on particular client technologies. It really looks to me like the Quick Start was pulling existing content together into a checklist more than anything else. We had large write-ups for Windows because historically it was more likely for Windows users to be unfamiliar in working with ssh and scp. Folks who use Linux as a local OS are quite likely to have ssh and scp from other projects/work/school. MacOS users are probably somewhere between.

If you have time and energy to try and make the list or the pages it links to better, please do @Alex! It takes a village, etc, etc. :) -- BryanDavis (talk) 22:00, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

This page and the 'my first X tool' pages

I've been thinking about how to make this page more helpful for different kinds of tools. One option that comes to my mind would be to update this page to be about the account creation and access setup only, and add a "next steps" section which links to the my first X tool pages for the actual tool creation and setup part. That way this page is more helpful to people who don't want to build PHP-based webservices and the my first X tool pages can have duplicated content removed. I started drafting what the quickstart page could look like here. Thoughts? Majavah (talk!) 16:45, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

This sounds great! Your draft is, in my opinion, a significant improvement over the current page. My suggestion is, instead of adding a "Next steps" section, call that section "Create your first tool" and then link to the "my first x tool" pages from there. Maybe also consider using the ContentGrid layout template for how you display the links to those "my first X tool" pages? Maybe. Anyways, great idea and thanks for doing this! Triciaburmeister (talk) 14:02, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

I've replaced the current page with my draft. I think it still needs some words on how to get familiar with the command line, but it's certainly an improvement over the current page. Majavah (talk!) 10:11, 7 April 2023 (UTC)