Dave Slusher

4 minute read

Spoketoberfest is wrapping up. Some of you earned your shirt from Digital Ocean (I did this year). Some of you will continue to work on your Spoke to achieve publishabilty after the month has ended. Once you reach the point of feeling ready to publish your Spoke to Share, what then? In this post, I will walk through the steps.

Pre-Publishing Checklist

The following are some of the lessons digested from the Spoke best practices document

  • If your Spoke has any authentication (most will) it needs a default Connection and Credential alias.
    • It should be the name of your Spoke (without the work “spoke” in it).
    • It should have a Connection Attribute named “Version” with a default value of the API version to which you integrate.
    • If your Spoke uses OAuth use should ship a default Application Registry without any of your secrets in it.
    • Seriously, triple check your Client ID and Client Secret have been scrubbed out before you publish.
  • Your Actions should be named in human readable fashion with spaces between words. Every would should begin with an uppercase letter.
  • Your Inputs and Outputs should be named human readably.
  • Begin your Action name with “Look Up” if it is searching for a record or records. Begin with “Get” if it is getting a record via sys_id Input.
  • Verify that all of your Actions have been published.

This is not the total list of best practices, but are some of the ones related to the aesthetics of your Spoke and the Actions inside it. The longer document is worth a look.

Packaging Your Spoke

When you are ready, it is time to publish your Spoke. This will need to be via Update Sets so that it can be uploaded to Share.

  1. Navigate to System Applications > My Company Applications. Click the In-Development tab to navigate to your scope. Do not click Edit in Studio but instead the title in the list. You want the platform record view, not Studio.

    Navigate to My Company Applications and the In-Development tab

  2. Scroll down to the Related Links and click Publish to Update Set….

    Click the Publish to Update Set related link

  3. Fill out the resulting screen with the version information (1.0.0 is fine if this is the initial publish) and a description. Click Publish.
  4. There will be a progress indicator then finally it will take you to an Update Set record. Click Export to XML and save to your local disk somewhere safe.

    Click the Export to XML related link

  5. Rename the update set from the system generated name to something meaningful, including the version number in the filename.

Publish to Share

With all the preparation done, take a deep breath. It is time to actually publish!

  1. Load up the Share site and login if necessary.
  2. The landing page will have a section titled Upload New Content. Under that, click Create Project.

    Click Create Project

  3. There are two steps to this form. First, fill out the information with the title, category of IntegrationHub Spoke and product of Now Platform. Enter any information necessary to the operation of your spoke in the description area.

    Fill out Step 1 of the form

  4. Step 2 of the form is where you will add your uupdate set, version number and applicable release families. There is a field for release notes in this part. For the initial upload there isn’t anything to update from previous versions so it is at your discretion how to parcel information between description and release notes.

    Fill out Step 2 of the form

  5. Click the Share button. At this point your Spoke is live.

    Final version of the uploaded project

  6. Celebrate, socialize the link and otherwise promote your work to the maximum extent you can stand!

There are not a lot of Spokes on Share as of the time of this writing. The Linode Spoke used as an example here is one of them, and you are free to use it as a template for anything you need to figure out either in Share publishing or Spoke development. As a reference, the GitHub repo is here.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback feel free to leave it in the comments. Happy spoking, sharing and developing!


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