Hi All,

Building CI for getting-started guides sounds useful to me. I suppose we'd
have to formalize the format of the related `.md` files somehow to make
automated execution possible.

I wonder about the reliability of these tests too. If CI is flaky (e.g.
containers not starting properly), it might be an irritation more than an
aid. It's worth a try in any case.

Cheers,
Dmitri.

On Tue, Jan 20, 2026 at 2:48 PM Yong Zheng <[email protected]> wrote:

> 100%. There are so many open source projects with outdated getting-started
> examples and it will be nice to have these in our CI pipelines. The only
> concern on my end is how do we defined coverage for getting-started
> example? Currently most of them have simple examples to do following:
> 1. use catalog
> 2. create namespace
> 3. create table under namespace
> 4. create some dummy data
>
> Will these be sufficient for CI? With these, we will only know the basic
> stuff work but if users tried to more complex things, we can't really
> guarantee it will still work. But will this be sufficient?
>
> Thanks,
> Yong Zheng
>
> On 2026/01/20 10:55:30 Robert Stupp wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > We have a nice collection of getting started guides in the source
> > repository [1].
> > The user-targeting description of each guide is in a README.md file.
> >
> > I would like to start a discussion and gather feedback about two
> > topics regarding the getting-started guides:
> >
> > 1. Website:
> > The user facing getting-started guides are well written but not very
> > visible to users, because those are not on the web site.
> > What are your thoughts of moving the getting-started guides to the
> website?
> >
> > 2. CI coverage:
> > Most, actually all, getting-started guides include code snippets
> > referencing Docker compose files.
> > Manually verifying these code snippets and Docker compose files,
> > during initial contribution or when those are being updated, is quite
> > some work.
> > I _think_ we can automate the verification of the code snippets, and
> > with those the Docker compose files, in CI.
> > The overall idea is to parse the getting-started guide markdown and
> > let a workflow execute the code blocks for shell/bash.
> > I am not sure whether all guides can actually be verified, because
> > some of those Docker compose files start a couple of containers, which
> > can be a resource (RAM/CPU) issue in GitHub's hosted runners.
> > The alternatives would be:
> > - Never update the getting-started guides with the risk that those
> > become stale and outdated.
> > - Keep the manual verification process.
> > Any thoughts on this?
> >
> > Robert
> >
> >
> > [1] https://github.com/apache/polaris/tree/main/getting-started
> >
>

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