Ayon installation video

Administration
1

Hi, I would like to request a video tutorial on deploying the Ayon; IMO, it’s not artist-friendly right now. It would be great if there were any video tutorials

Appreciating the support for preparing the documentation but involves lot of RnD to learn and deploy

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Not affiliated to the AYON team, but I dont think this will happen:

  • Keeping documentation up to date on a project is hard enough when it is generated from the code, even harder when you include screenshots, but doing it in video require another level of effort, and on top of that it will be obsolete in a few months time.
  • Deploying and maintaining a “complex” system like AYON or any other “proper pipeline” require minimal technical knowledge. If you don’t have such knowledge nor someone in your team to handle it, a video tutorial won’t fill that gap.

(but this is where the AYON team can help you I imagine :slight_smile:)

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Thank you @aprayez, you are 100% correct.

We trying our best to improve on the documentation in general, but on a live project like this, written docs are more valuable at the moment.

Second point is also spot on. AYON is not aimed at individuals and artists, but rather studios and teams than value long term robustness over initial simplicity. I believe the deployment of the server is about as simkple as it can be at the moment. The desktop app will be a bit better as soon as we move out of beta, but even that can be ran and compiled with scripts we already provide.

Sorry @Krishna_Avril but we have bigger fish to fry at the moment. This will probably happen. But it’ll take a while

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Well, uhm… maybe. There are definitely leaps of improvements that can still help. Some will come with time but others might still require just some dedicated effort. Having said that, there’s already great effort put into it and it helped me get started a few days back (even though it did feel like a hurdle upfront due to “a few repos”, “install this & that”. At the very best I’d love a “click here and do a test run” getting started, where it doesn’t customize, doesn’t persist the database maybe but at least I can play locally. And then get to a “Here’s how to install for production”

  • A dedicated “Getting started” documentation which documents the quickest way to get up and running without large deviating instructions (except for linking to “more info”). A click here, click here, run this, run that. Any deviating instructions start becoming confusing. An example is the Ayon-docker instruction to “Modify the default settings in the settings/template.json file.” When installing you have no idea what you might want to change there since you have no knowledge of the system. It’s written as if I should change something. I’d consider myself relatively technical, but as soon getting started docs start being ambiguous like that I go down a rabbit hole of “ok, so now what?”. This already goes a long way, so good job on that.

    • Then after the Getting Started docs you can have a lengthier walkthrough of installation and maintaining the install (like updating). But usually you’d want the very first test run of some software to have as little details as possible just to start playing and then read into more details on customizations, etc.
    • From a more technical artist standpoint I’d even like a very small ‘snippet’ of commands of what you’ll roughly be doing in the end. For example at the top here I wrote a .bat script that roughly describes my steps as I went to deploy Ayon server - I love having that handy to see “oh, so those are all the steps” (but maybe because the commands just make more sense to me since it’s super-explicit what to do technically)

  • Aside of installation, also document how to safely update. I have installed and deployed the ayon server docker, but at this point have no knowledge how to update. Also how do I kill the server data and create a new one, etc.

  • The deployment of addons (as is being worked on) can be easier without the need for manual copying.

  • This seems to miss a step on how to activate the addons - otherwise they won’t even be listed there. It misses:

You need to enable addons first in settings/addons version (soon to be replaced with more complex page with an option to install addons from packages).

  1. Top right > Settings > Addon Versions > Set the versions
  2. Now they will show in Settings > Studio Settings and also under the Manage Projects > Project Settings and Studio Settings pages.

Which was explained to me on discord here and has been asked many times before that.

I agree with the heavy development with it now still in beta it doesn’t make too much sense to create a crazy detailed tutorial video to get started - it’ll be obsolete in a few weeks. However, there’s definitely still onboarding documentation that can be improved.

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Very true. We’re super close to replacing that whole thing with a sleeker installation and management of production and staging addons, hence to movement on that guide. Hopefully days away from that being deployed

1 Like
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For reference,

There’s a step by step guide here.

Also, there should be videos once Ayon reaches the first official production release.