SSH, runbook state, menu item, and more

Desktop
1

I just received my Atuin Desktop invitation several days ago, and only got time today to try it. I intend to use it as a replacement for some home-brewed server operation scripts, but found several issues.

  1. There is no AppImage package for Linux. I’m on Manjaro Linux and I referred to [[Arch and its Derivatives PKGBUILD]] to create and install the rpm package.

  2. There is no manual sync on Linux. IIRC there was a “Sync now” menu item in the macOS version, correct me if I’m wrong. I signed in to Atuin Hub and it’s stucked on syncing runbooks created on macOS. The category is synced, but the runbooks show as Loading.... I then logged out and use the offline mode.

  3. The Window menu has no menu item. When clicked it shows an empty rectangle.

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  4. What the tutorial runbook does not say is the execution of whole runbook would block on Terminal block.

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    This is confusing for someone not familiar with runbook tools. I think the tutorial should educate about that.

  5. SSH connection does not work when target host use specific key for authentication (set in ~/.ssh/config), basically Atuin Desktop does not read SSH config at all. This was already reported in [[SSH connection issues]]. I’ve seen both code: Session(-34) and code: Session(-7), no clue what they mean.

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    When SSH block throws error, the runbook does not stop - the run button displays a stop icon, and when I open another runbook it prompts me to terminate current runbook.

  6. Script block does not work with environment management tools like goenv. It works with Terminal block, but as previouslly said, Terminal blocks would block runbook execution.

  7. The SSH block icon is very confusing, see:

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    It says Manually connect (otherwise we will try to connect automatically when needed), this looks like a state switch for me - if I click on the icon I expect it to change to Automatically connect or something. But that does not happen, and I have no idea whether this intentional.

  8. Template variables should have auto completion (when typing starts with {{var.), otherwise it’s hard to check for typos.

2

Thanks for all the feedback! Just some quick responses as I’m traveling at the moment:

  1. We recently stopped building AppImages due to issues we had with it. Once we’re open to the wider community, we expect there to be some combination of repos we host and repos the community maintains to support various Linux distributions.
  2. Syncing for non-orgs is a bit weird right now as we’ve been working on organization support. Soon we’ll be making a clearer distinction between workspaces that sync and workspaces that are local only.
  3. Some of the menus are indeed a bit odd on Linux, I’ll look into this.
  4. You’re right, we could be clearer on this. If you want a terminal block to automatically continue, you can end it with an exit
  5. SSH blocks are quite new — as you’ve read, expect a lot of improvements here soon!
  6. Script blocks are non-interactive which causes this behavior. The exit trick above should get you going in this case with terminal blocks.
  7. We’ll look into this!
  8. This is a great idea and I’ll look into this too.

Thanks again!!

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