In your Install/Setup guide, you’ve mentioned that you can setup influxdb either from the UI or command line; but if you set it up from the UI, you wouldn’t be able to see the token once you finished the setup process (there’s no token creation notification whatsoever; you are left with a created token under the API token tab).
If I set it up in the command line, however, I can see the new operator token because all of that information is saved directly to the local config file.
Did I miss anything here? If new user chooses to set up in the UI, the new user has a good chance to spend an hour or even more reading docs to no avail.
The difference between these two approaches are not documented.
It’s been a bumpy trial and error for me just to set up the database.
Thanks, I can see that; but under the API Token tab, all I can see is the token’s name and permissions it has, not the token itself; and when I go back to terminal and use influx config command, I was asked to provide the token itself, which I can’t see if I set it up via UI.
influx setup, on the other hand, would note down the setup info I entered into the configs file, which include the token itself.
I might have missed something when I do it from UI.
Yes, I am able to create all-access token from the UI and I can note down the token at the time of creation. It’s only when I setup my account the operator token doesn’t really show itself after creation like when we create an all-access token.
I tried several times today and read their documentation a few times. I believe they both have confirmed that we are creating an operator token at setup and all-access token is just an optional thing.
To be honest, I found InfluxDB’s documentation confusing at times.
Here’s an excerpt from InfluxDB’s setup guide on their website:
(Optional) Create an All Access API token.
During the InfluxDB initialization process, you created a user and API token that has permissions to manage everything in your InfluxDB instance. This is known as an Operator token. While you can use your Operator token to interact with InfluxDB, we recommend creating an all access token that is scoped to an organization.
To run setup with prompts for the required information, enter the following command in your terminal:
influx setup
Complete the following steps as prompted by the CLI:
Enter a primary username.
Enter a password for your user.
Confirm your password by entering it again.
Enter a name for your primary organization.
Enter a name for your primary bucket.
Enter a retention period for your primary bucket—valid units are nanoseconds (ns), microseconds (us or µs), milliseconds (ms), seconds (s), minutes (m), hours (h), days (d), and weeks (w). Enter nothing for an infinite retention period.
Confirm the details for your primary user, organization, and bucket.
Once setup completes, InfluxDB is initialized with the user, organization, bucket, and operator token.
InfluxDB creates a default configuration profile for you that provides your InfluxDB URL, organization, and API token to influx CLI commands. For more detail about configuration profiles, see influx config.
OK, thanks for recapping that. I guess I never knew about the operator token, but it has never stood in the way of using the database since I created tokens (one all-access and several read/write).
I understand; but as a new user, I almost certainly would have to follow their installation and setup guides, and their guides really aren’t very straightforward; If a new user has to do trial and error with the setup guide, there’s room to improve.
