Snowflake Guides

What are Snowflake Guides?

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

You can submit your own SFGuide 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 SFGuide!

What's special about the SFGuide 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 codelab
Mobile friendly user experience

How to get started

nodejs & npm (Install NodeJS & npm)
install gulp-cli:

npm install --global gulp-cli

install Golang (Install Go)
add /usr/local/go/bin to the PATH environment variable. You can do this by adding the following line to your profile (.bashrc or .zshrc):

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

Note: Changes made to a profile file may not apply until the next time you log into your computer. To apply the changes immediately, just run the shell commands directly or execute them from the profile using a command such as source $HOME/.zshrc.

install claat:

go get github.com/googlecodelabs/tools/claat

navigate to the site directory:

cd site/

install dependencies:

npm install

run the site locally

gulp serve

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

Now lets add our first SFGuide:

Terminate the running gulp server with ctrl C and navigate to the devlab directory

cd site/devlabs

The devlabs directory is where to store all SFGuide content, written in markdown.

Use the claat tool to convert the markdown file to HTML

claat export sample.md

You should see ok sample as the response. This means claat has successfully converted your .md file to HTML and created a new directory named sample.

Now lets run our server again, this time specifying our devlabs directory of content

gulp serve --codelabs-dir=devlabs

You can now navigate to the landing page in your browser to see your new codelab!

You can use the sample SFGuide as a template, just change the name of the file and the id listed in the header.

Tips

Review the sample.md file to learn more about to to structure your SFGuide for the claat tool.
You can also see more formating information in the claat documentation, and use the command claat -h
You can see the supported SFGuide 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 SFGuides, check out this excellent tutorial

How do I publish my Snowflake Guide to guides.snowflake.com?

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

To learn more how to submit a pull request on GitHub in general, checkout github's official documentation.