Documentation
The tk-desktop engine is an application to let you easily run your Toolkit apps. It is a system tray based window that makes it easy to get started with Toolkit, setup Projects for Toolkit, and access your Projects' pipeline.
This doc is a short users guide for the Desktop app. If you are looking to download the Desktop app or for a guide on how to get started with Toolkit, please see our documentation on setting up your first project:
LINKBOX_DOC:1:Setting up your first Project
If you have already set up your first project and you are looking for help configuring it to meet your needs, see our 'next steps' documentation:
LINKBOX_DOC:55:Beyond your first project
When the application starts up it shows up as an icon in your system tray. To show the window, click the icon. By default the window will be pinned to the system tray, which means that if the window loses focus, it will automatically hide itself.
You can unpin the window by selecting "Undock from Menu" from the user menu or by dragging it by its header. When the window is unpinned it will look like a regular window and will no longer hide itself when it loses focus.
While the window is undocked, you can hide it by clicking on the close button. To show it again, click on the system tray icon.
The first main view of the app is the project browser. Here you will see all the projects in your Shotgun instance. Your most recently accessed projects will be listed first.
Clicking on a project will take you to the command launcher view for that project, where you can launch the tools in the project's configuration.
Near the bottom right of the window you will see your Shotgun account's thumbnail. This is the user menu, where you can do things like dock/undock the window, keep it on top of other windows, and show the logging console.
At the top of the window, you can click on the magnifying glass icon to show the search box. Typing in this box will filter the list of projects shown to just those that contain the letters you are typing.
Once you've clicked on a project you are taken to the command launcher for that project. This window will show whatever Toolkit apps are configured for the desktop engine in the project's configuration.
This window shows a grid of buttons. Simply click on a button to launch its app. The app will run in a project specific environment, and if it is an app that Toolkit supports, you'll have access to all your pipeline tools already setup for you.
The command launcher can show the most recent commands you've launched so it is easy to get at your most used tools. The commands can be grouped into collapsible groups so that they are easy to organize. Multiple commands can also be collapsed into a single button, for things like giving access to multiple versions of Maya while still having a single Maya button.
How commands are grouped, and how they are collapsed is completely customizable. See the documentation on the engine settings below for details.
---FOLD--- Click for details on the environment and pipeline configurations that populate this view
The command launcher window always uses the project environment from the project's primary configuration. If you have access to more than one pipeline configuration for the project, you can switch between them from the project menu on the right hand side of the project header.
For more information on how to use multiple pipeline configurations for a project, see our document on managing your project configuration:
LINKBOX_DOC:53:Managing your Project Configuration
---FOLD---
You can launch the console from the user menu. The logs from launching a project are displayed here. If you run into an error, the details of the error should be shown here.
If you right click on the console, you are given a standard edit menu, allowing you to select all of the text, copy your selection, or to clear the text in the console.
When you launch the desktop application, it will startup the tk-desktop engine for your site configuration. This configuration is usually automatically managed, although it is possible to disable that behavior and take control over what is in that environment.
One of the fundamental principles of Toolkit is that projects can be completely isolated from each other. This is usually done to make sure that changes made to one project cannot adversely effect another project (possibly nearing delivery). In order to offer this project isolation, the desktop engine makes sure that whenever you are looking at the commands for a particular project, you will run them in a separate python interpreter that has been initialized just for that project.
When you click on a project, a python interpreter is launched in the background. This python interpreter is the one the project has been configured to use and on startup will initialize the tk-desktop for that project. That instance of the engine will communicate back to the GUI what commands it can launch.
When you click on a command, that background python process is responsible for launching the command. This makes it possible (for example) to have one project running python 2.6 while testing python 2.7 on another project.