Snowflake Quickstarts

What are Snowflake Quickstarts?

Snowflake Quickstarts are interactive tutorials and self-serve demos written in markdown syntax. Quickstarts provide a unique step-by-step reading experience and automatically saves tutorial progress for readers. These tutorials are published at quickstarts.snowflake.com

You can submit your own Quickstarts to be published on Snowflake's website by submitting a pull request to this repo. This repository contains all the tools and documentation you’ll need for building, writing, and submitting your own Quickstart!

What's special about the Quickstart format?

• Powerful and flexible authoring flow in Markdown text
• Ability to produce interactive web or markdown tutorials without writing any code
• Easy interactive previewing
• Usage monitoring via Google Analytics
• Support for multiple target environments or events (conferences, kiosk, web, offline, etc.)
• Support for anonymous use - ideal for public computers at developer events
• Looks great, with a responsive web implementation
• Remembers where the student left off when returning to a quickstarts
• Mobile friendly user experience

Getting Started

Prerequisites

1. Install Node Version Manager (nvm)
   • Not sure if you have it installed? Run nvm or nvm -v at the command line and hit enter. If you encounter a "command not found" error, you likely do not have it installed.
2. Install Node v14 (required to run the site locally) using nvm: nvm install 14
   • If you have Homebrew installed, run: brew install node@14
3. Install gulp-cli npm i -g gulp-cli
4. Install Go
   • If you have Homebrew installed, run: brew install golang
   • Install claat go install github.com/googlecodelabs/tools/claat@latest
   • Ensure go and claat is in your PATH claat path setup
5. Optional: install the live-reload plugin for Chrome: LiveReload

Run locally

1. Fork this repository to your personal GitHub account (top right of webpage, fork button)
2. Clone your new fork git clone git@github.com:<YOUR-USERNAME>/sfquickstarts.git sfquickstarts
3. Navigate to the site directory cd sfquickstarts/site
4. Set the project to use Node v14 by running nvm use. If you an encounter an error stating you don't have the correct version installed, run nvm install. For more help, see steps 1 and 2 in the Prerequisites above.
5. Install node dependencies npm install
6. Run the site npm run serve
7. Open a browser to http://localhost:8000/

Congratulations! You now have the Snowflake Quickstarts landing page running.

Common Errors

1. Claat related errors

• Make sure Go is properly in your PATH. Add the following lines to your profile (~/.profile, or ~/.zshrc):

#adding Golang to path
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin
export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/go/bin

Note: After adding Go to your PATH, be sure to apply your new profile: source ~/.profile or source ~/.zshrc

2. You get a EACCES error when installing gulp-cli

• This means that your npm location needs to be updated. Follow the steps here: Resolve EACCESS permissions

3. You get Error: Cannot find module 'postcss' when running npm run serve

• The module may not have been installed for some reason so run npm install --save-dev postcss gulp-postcss and then rerun npm run serve

Write Your First Quickstart

1. Terminate the running server with ctrl C and navigate to the sfguides source directory cd sfguides/src
   • In this directory, you will see all existing guides and their markdown files.
2. Generate a new guide from the guide template npm run template <GUIDE_NAME>
   • Don't use spaces in the name of your guide, instead use underscores.
3. Navigate to the newly generated guide (cd sfguides/src/<GUIDE_NAME>) and edit your guide in a tool like VS Code.
4. Run the website again npm run serve
5. As you edit and save changes, your changes will automatically load in the browser.

You can always read the sample Quickstart online.

Tips

• Review the sample.md file to learn more about how to structure your Quickstart for the claat tool.
• You can see the supported Quickstart categories here. If you want to suggest a new category please create a GitHub issue!
• Checkout how to use VS Code to write markdown files
• If you want to learn more about Quickstarts, check out this excellent tutorial

How do I get my Snowflake Quickstart on quickstarts.snowflake.com?

1. You will need to sign Snowflake's CLA
2. Fork this repository
3. Clone it to your local system
4. Make a new branch
5. Make your changes
6. Push it back to your repo
7. Open this repository on GitHub.com
8. Click the Pull Request button to open a new pull request
9. Snowflake will review and approve the submission

To learn more about how to submit a pull request on GitHub in general, check out GitHub's official documentation.

Reporting issues or errata in Quickstarts

If you encounter an issue in a Quickstart (outdated copy or data, typos, broken links, etc.), please file an issue. Be sure to include the following information:

1. The title of the Quickstart
2. A link to the Quickstart
3. A description of the problem
4. A proposed solution, if applicable (optional)