1. Using Visual Builder Studio
  2. Overview
  3. Get Yourself Set Up

2 Get Yourself Set Up

You can set your preferences, including your display name, email address, gravatar, and email notifications, from the User Preferences page.

To get to this page, click the user avatar and select Preferences:

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Description of the illustration user_menu.png

After setting your user preferences, you'll need to set up a Git client and decide whether to display the news banner or hide it.

Update Your Display Name

By default, VB Studio displays your Oracle Cloud account name as your display name across all pages. If you want to change it, you can do so from the User Preference page’s Profile tab.

  1. On the User Preferences page, click the Profile tab.
  2. In First Name and Last Name, update your name.
    The name is saved when the focus moves out of the field.
  3. To the left of the User Preferences title, click Back to return to the last opened page.

Update Your Email Address

By default, VB Studio displays your Oracle Cloud email address across all pages and sends email notifications, such as merge request notifications and issue notifications, to this email address.

If you want VB Studio email notifications sent to another email address, you can change it on the User Preference page’s Profile tab:

  • If you’re using an email address as your Oracle Cloud login username, your original Oracle Cloud email address continues to be your login username even after you change your email address preference.

  • After you provide another email address, you’ll receive a verification email. It's important that you take the time to verify the new email address because, if you don't, you won't receive any VB Studio email notifications. You can, however, continue to use VB Studio.

Here's how to change the email address that email notifications will be sent to:

  1. On the User Preferences page, click the Profile tab.
  2. In the Email Address field, enter your new email address.
    The email address is saved when the focus moves out of the field.
  3. Click the Re-send email button.
  4. In the email that you receive, click the confirmation link to confirm the email address.
    After the verification, you’re redirected to the service page.
  5. Open the Profile tab again and verify that the Email Address field displays the Verified label.
  6. To the left of the User Preferences title, click Back to return to the last opened page.

Add Your Avatar Picture

VB Studio displays your Gravatar picture as the avatar picture. If you don’t have a picture set in Gravatar or don’t have a Gravatar account, VB Studio displays your initials instead of your avatar picture. To find out more about Gravatar, see https://gravatar.com/.

Here's how to create a Gravatar account and upload your Gravatar picture:
  1. Open http://en.gravatar.com/ in your browser.
  2. Click Create Your Own Gravatar.
  3. Follow the on-screen instructions, enter the required details, and sign up.
    Create your account with the same email address that you used to subscribe to Oracle Cloud.
  4. After activating your account, sign in to Gravatar.
  5. Upload the avatar picture to your Gravatar account.
The picture uploaded to your Gravatar account is automatically displayed as your avatar picture in VB Studio.

Configure Your Global Email Notifications

You can configure your preferences to receive email notifications when a component, such as an issue or a Git repository's branch that you’re subscribed to, is updated. Your preferences apply to all projects in which you're a member.

Note:

If your email address has changed, click the verification link in the email from VB Studio if you want to receive VB Studio email notifications. If you don't do this, when you go to the Profile tab under User Preferences, you'll see a Not Verified Error icon message next to your email address. Click the Re-send email button next to the error message and respond to that email when it reaches your inbox.
Configure your notifications:
  1. On the User Preferences page, click the Notifications tab.
  2. Select or deselect the Notify Me Of check boxes.

    Some check boxes are selected by default. For a selected component, its notifications from all projects of the organization where you’re a member are enabled. You must subscribe or set up a watch on the component to get notifications about its updates:

    Select this check box ... To receive email notifications about:

    Issue updates, attachments and comments

    Issues you’re assigned to, or you’re watching.

    Merge Request updates and comments

    Merge requests where you’re a reviewer, or you’re watching.

    New features, tips, and events

    New features, tips, and events from the VB Studio team.

    Service and system maintenance updates

    Service and system maintenance updates from the VB Studio team.

    Build activities

    Jobs you’re watching and pipeline approvals that require your attention and a response.

    SCM/Push Activities

    Git repository branches you’re watching.

    Wiki page updates and comments

    Wiki pages you’re watching.

    Project Updates

    User updates when you or a user is added to or removed from a project, or the project role is changed.

    Include my Own Updates

    Your own changes.

    If you don’t select the check box, you won’t receive email notifications for issues, merge requests, pipeline approvals, and Git updates that you initiated or created even though the Issues updates, attachments and comments, the Merge Request updates and comments, Build activities, and the SCM/Push Activities check boxes are selected.

  3. To the left of the User Preferences title, click Back to return to the last opened page.

Set Up a Git Client

You can use use any Git client, such as the Git command-line interface (CLI), to access Git repositories from your computer. However, you cannot access projects, issues, and builds from a Git client.

Git Command-Line Interface

Before you can use a Git client to access your project's Git repository, you must first install and configure it on your computer. The Git command line-interface (CLI) is the most popular Git client.

Here's how to download, install, and configure the Git CLI:

  1. Download and install the Git CLI.

    On Windows, use the Git Bash CLI to access project Git repositories. You can download Git Bash (version 1.8.x or later) from http://git-scm.com/downloads.

    On Linux and Unix, install Git using the preferred package manager. You can download Git for Linux and Unix from http://git-scm.com/download/linux.

  2. The VB Studio pages display your username and email address as the committer's name and email ID. Configure variables to set up your name and email address:

    • To configure your user name, set the user.name variable:

      git config --global user.name "John Doe"

    • To configure your email address, set the user.email variable:

      git config --global user.email "johndoe@example.com"

    • To disable SSL or configure the proxy server, set the http.sslVerify or http.proxy variables:

      git config --global http.sslVerify false

      git config --global http.proxy http://www.testproxyserver.com:80/

Tip:

To find out the value of a variable, use the git config <variable> command:

git config user.name

Upload Your Public SSH Key

Before you can connect to a Git repository using SSH, you must first generate a private-public RSA SSH key pair and upload the public key to VB Studio. If you use multiple computers to access Git repositories, you'll need to generate an SSH key pair from each computer and upload its public key.

Generate an SSH Key

To generate an RSA SSH key pair, you can use any SSH client, including the Git CLI.

These steps assume you’re using Git CLI to generate the SSH keys:
  1. Open the Git CLI.
  2. On the command prompt, enter ssh-keygen -t rsa.
    To generate a larger key, enter ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096. If you're using a macOS version 10.13.6 (or higher), enter ssh-keygen -m PEM -t rsa.
  3. When prompted, enter a file name for the key and press Enter.
    If you don’t want to specify a file name, leave the name blank and press Enter. By default, the key pair files are saved as id_rsa.pub and id_rsa in the .ssh sub-directory under the Git HOME directory. For example, on Windows, the files are saved in C:\Users\<USER_PROFILE>\.ssh\.
  4. Enter a passphrase and press Enter. If you don’t want to specify a passphrase, leave it blank and press Enter.
    When prompted to confirm the passphrase, enter the same passphrase. If you didn’t specify a passphrase earlier, leave it blank and press Enter.

By default, Git CLI access the C:\Users\<USER_PROFILE>\.ssh\ directory to locate the private key. If you are using another Git client, you may need to configure it to access the private SSH key. Check your Git client’s documentation to find out how to do that.

Add the Public SSH Key to Your VB Studio Account

After generating an SSH private-public key pair, add the public key to your User Preferences page’s Authentication tab.

  1. On the computer where you generated the SSH key pair, navigate to the directory where the public key is saved.
  2. Open the public key file in a text editor, select the contents, and copy them to the clipboard.
  3. In VB Studio, click the user avatar and select Preferences.
  4. Click the Authentication tab.
  5. Click Add Key.
  6. In the New SSH Key dialog box, enter a unique name and paste the SSH key that you copied in Step 2.
  7. Click Create.
  8. To the left of the User Preferences title, click Back to return to the last opened page.

Set Up Token-Based Authentication

You can create temporary OAuth access tokens to enable access to VB Studio project operations, including Git, Maven and NPM actions, from your VB Studio account preferences.

Keep the following in mind when creating access tokens:
  • You must copy a token immediately after you generate it and paste it somewhere that you can access it later. You won't have another opportunity to access the token.
  • After an access token has been created, it can't be edited. If you want to change the permissions for a token, you'll need to delete it and then create a new one.
  • If the permissions for a user are changed at the project level, this can affect the token-based authentication.

Note:

If you're using curl to work with REST APIs and federated users in a multi-stripe Oracle Cloud Applications environment, one approach is to authenticate with a bearer token. See the example in Sending Curl Request with Bearer Token to learn about how to use Curl with the -H "Authorization: Bearer {token}" authorization header to send the token to the server. If you don't send the token this way, you'll encounter an HTTP Status 401 error, indicating that you aren't authorized to make the call.

To create a VB Studio authentication token:

  1. Click your VB Studio user avatar and select Preferences.
  2. Click the Personal Access Tokens tab.
  3. Click + Access Token.
  4. In Token Label, add a label for the token.
  5. In Expiration, choose the expiration time period. You can choose from the list or set a custom time.
  6. Specify the permission scope:
    • Read-only permissions of user: Gives you read-only access to all projects you are part of.
    • All user rights: Applies the token to all of your current project user permissions. This doesn't include ability to create or delete tokens or modify any other profile preferences.
    • Manually define advanced access level: Select a project and click in the Membership and Permission field to select permissions that you want to assign to the token.
      Description of vbstudio_tokens.png follows
      Description of the illustration vbstudio_tokens.png

  7. Click Generate.
    An email notification will be sent to the address of the user registered for the account. This notification is sent for both expiring and non-expiring tokens.
  8. Copy the token and paste it in a text file that you can access later. You won't be able to access the token after the dialog is dismissed.
  9. Click Dismiss.
You can view the details for each token you've created by selecting the token and viewing the information in the Basic Details and Scopes tabs.

You can also delete the token, which removes any permissions granted by the token.


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After a token has been deleted, applications or scripts that use that token will no longer have access to the VB Studio API.

See the News Banner

A banner with the latest news from the VB Studio team is displayed on the Organization and Project Home pages' header.

To navigate between news pages, click the navigation buttons. To expand or collapse the banner, use the Expand the Down arrow icon or Collapse the Up arrow icon icons. To close the banner, click Close the X icon.
If the banner isn't visible, here's how to enable it:
  1. On the User Preferences page, click the General tab.
  2. Select the Show News Banner on Organization and Project Home check box.
  3. To the left of the User Preferences title, click Back to return to the last opened page.