Changes to Toolkit App Store backend and Desktop

[tannaz]

On Tuesday June 30th, we released some backend changes to the way Shotgun Desktop downloads updates from the Toolkit App Store. These changes were transparent to the majority of users, but caused problems for some studios. We rolled back those changes yesterday, reverting tk-config-basic from v1.3.10 back to v1.3.9, but we’re ready to release them again. We want to make sure you have the information you need to understand what’s going on and prevent disruption in your studio with the release.

The change:

Historically, when your Toolkit site configuration auto-updates, it downloads its components from the Toolkit App Store site, tank.shotgunstudio.com. On Monday, we switched to uploading directly to AWS S3 cloud storage. We set up a proxy on our end, s3-proxy.shotgunstudio.com, so that clients would not be accessing S3 directly to download updates. Nevertheless, the change required studios with a firewall or proxy to modify their filters to allow downloads from s3-proxy.shotgunstudio.com or the IP addresses behind it.

The problem:

A few studios with proxies were still getting download errors when Desktop tried to update their site config, even when they added s3-proxy.shotgunstudio.com to their allow list.

The rollback:

On Wednesday July 1rst we rolled back from v1.3.10 to v1.3.9. It was the safest way to go, but it prevents us from understanding how many people are really affected negatively by the changes we made.

Moving forward:

We’re in communication with the studios that reported problems, and are locking them off on v1.3.9 in anticipation of rereleasing v1.3.10. We’ll work with these studios individually to make sure they’re configured properly to prevent future errors before bringing them back to v1.3.10.

Next steps for you:

As we release v1.3.10, in most cases, this should have no effect on your studio.

If you do get errors in Desktop like

Failed to download Toolkit App Store Config tk-config-basic v1.3.10. Error: Failed to download from 'https://tank.shotgunstudio.com' after 5 retries. See error log for details.

do the following:

• If your studio is filtering which sites can be accessed based on IP addresses, make sure the entire range of IPs required to download from the Tank AppStore is allowed.
• If you are filtering which sites can be accessed based on FQDNs (for example tank.shotgunstudio.com), you need to add s3-proxy.shotgunstudio.com to your allow list.

If you make one of the above changes and still encounter issues, lock your site config off on v1.3.9 of tk-config-basic, and contact support@shotgunsoftware.com.

Locking off your site config:

To lock off your site config, go to a Pipeline Configuration entity page in Shotgun.

If you already have an entity with an empty “Project” field, this is your site config. If not, create one, with the following fields populated:

Name: Primary
Project: Leave empty
Plugin ids: basic.*
Descriptor: sgtk:descriptor:app_store?name=tk-config-basic&version=v1.3.9

Once you’re locked off, please contact us at support@shotgunsoftware.com so we can help get you up and running with the v1.3.10 release.

When you’re ready to go back to auto-updating, you can just clear the Descriptor field on the pipeline configuration.

We won’t be releasing v1.3.10 this week, but barring any blockers, we do plan to release on Monday. Let us know if you have any questions. We’ve released v1.3.10 Monday 10:30pm Eastern time.

Note that you’ll need to have this setup working by August 3. Please let us know if you have any issues.

[jfboismenu]

Hi everyone,
I’d like to add, if you are unable to make this change at the moment, you can disable downloads from the Toolkit App Store by setting the SHOTGUN_DISABLE_APPSTORE_ACCESS environment variable to 1. This will allow the Shotgun Desktop to start without trying to auto-update.

[jfboismenu]

Hi again,
The update is once again live as of July 6th 10:30AM Eastern time. If you’re having issues, please try the steps above. Then reach to support so we know you are impacted and we can reach back to you.
Cheers,
JF

[alatteri]

Hi Tanaz and JFB.

I was just pointed to this by David M from Support. This was out issue and our fix. I’m wondering if you could create a Announce forum for critical items like this? It would be very helpful to be able to subscribe to something like that so we don’t miss stuff like this in the flurry of other posts.

Thanks,
Alan

[jfboismenu]

Hi Alan,

We did actually post something on July 13th, which automatically bumped each week at the top of the forum. A banner also went up on hosted sites that week. Maybe you missed them? See Changes to Toolkit App Store – August 3.

We’ll take your suggestion of a post that you can subscribe to into consideration. That’s a nice idea!

Have a nice weekend,

JF

[johnny.duguid]

Hey @alatteri—thanks for the feedback!

Here’s a tip that you can use right now for getting notified: you can turn on and tune notifications for any tags on the forum—including #announcement.

All you have to do is click the tag (#announcement), click the upper right icon on the tag page, and adjust your notification settings to whatever you like.

You’ll then receive a notification whenever there’s activity around #notifications.

There are some additional things we can do to improve the experience on the forum and we’ll roll those out after getting the team on board.

One last bit—while we’ll post major announcements on the forum for additional visibility, critical announcements will continue to be delivered directly via traditional in-app and/or direct outreach.

[alatteri]

Thanks for the info Johnny.