Feedback thread for "Getting Started" docs

[taylorsilva]

• Did you have any questions after following the tutorial?
• Any sections that were unclear or confusing to follow?
• Other topics or areas of Concourse you think the tutorial should cover?

2025 Update

I've updated the Getting Started tutorial and have marked all comments as "outdated" since they all discussed specifics about the now "old" tutorial.

The new tutorial drops the iframes to localhost:8080 and adds a bunch of images and videos. I hope this better showcases Concourse's web UI.

[taylorsilva]

With 7.14.0 out, there are official ARM images of Concourse.

[taylorsilva]

Third line from the bottom looks to be the main error message you want to debug. no such host. Usually means it was a DNS resolution error. Before that part I can see it's hitting 8.8.8.8 for the DNS lookup, so you already have custom DNS configured. Not sure why you're getting this 🙁

Is there something up with your Docker networking? Rebooting the docker vm or your computer may resolve this.

[paulmiller3000]

It may be in the docs and I'm just an idiot, but after hours of searching I finally learned that my pipeline cannot pull in a task from another file in memory. For example, I can't get ./scripts/test.sh and run it as part of my pipeline UNLESS it exists somewhere on the web. For me, this was counterintuitive and represented hours of banging my head against a wall.

Fortunately, I found the statement below at this site. Making this a bit more clear -- or adding a flashing light for dummies like me -- would be a huge help. And I'll buy you a drink!

When creating separate task files, it’s important to understand, that only the main pipeline definition will be stored in system memory. Everything else, including separate task definition files, will be fetched from some external resource (e.g. git in our case).

[rudolf-c0]

Following the getting started tutorial fails for me because there is no worker node in the docker-compose.yml and the concourse container isn't running in privileged mode so can't start another container. Error message:

run check: find or create container on worker 6515ca34311e: starting task: new task: failed to create shim task: OCI runtime create failed: runc create failed: unable to start container process: error during container init: error loading seccomp filter into kernel: error loading seccomp filter: invalid argument: unknown

Note: Tried this with concourse 7.12.0 because of local constraints but doubt that running on most recent concourse would change the root cause. Would it be worth adding a worker node to the docker-compose-yml and a section discussing how to set up workers?

[taylorsilva]

The concourse container is started with the quickstart command, which runs the web and worker in the same container under one process: https://github.com/concourse/docs/blob/baa91cae31eaa095bc10f7aaebe0871e63667caa/docs/docker-compose.yml#L18

The worker must have failed to come up for some reason. You should check the logs for errors with docker compose logs concourse.

We do test this compose file in our CI and its currently passing.

What OS/kernel are you running this on? Are you using docker or podman? Any other information you think might be relevant?

[rudolf-c0]

Thanks for the reply and I apologize, I missed the "privileged" setting and was running this in an environment that didn't allow privileged execution.

Since I really want to avoid enabling privileged execution, I am now exploring how to add an external worker. Google and claude are helpful here but it would be nice if there was a docker compose file or tutorial showing this because the way the docker compose file is set up and the way the "Installation" section is structured don't map up very well.

[taylorsilva]

There's actually a mostly done set of docs that do go through this! You can view the PR for them here: https://github.com/concourse/docs/pull/603/changes
or click here for a rendered view of the docker compose steps: https://github.com/Aviator-Labs/docs-ci/blob/8b5b85c2269d92f1b59a2029ec7592487304740d/docs/docs/how-to/install-guides/docker-compose.md

Hope that helps!