Quick Start could be more detailed

[bertday]

Hello CH team! Thank you for this awesome project 😄

I'm a brand new user and just trying out the Quick Start. I was surprised when I ran clickhouse server and it created a number of files and folders in my current working directory. It was actually a bit of a pain because I had to clean them up and then decide on where to keep my ClickHouse config.

However, that decision itself was also tricky because the idea of ClickHouse config hadn't really been introduced. Is there a file system location where most people run clickhouse server from? I wasn't clear on that.

In a few words, I think the Quick Start is a great place for newcomers to start, but could be leveraged better to explain the most basic CH admin concepts. I'd be happy to submit a PR for this but I'm not sure I'm quite up to speed yet. Hopefully soon 😄

[Blargian]

Hi @bertday, thanks for opening this issue. You're definitely not the first one to run into that problem. When running ./clickhouse server after the curl command the table data gets stored in the folder that the clickhouse binary is in. There is also a -C [ --config-file ] argument which can be used to set the location of the config.xml file that's used for configuration. It's mentioned on the Install page but it's not so obvious.

Production Deployments installs or running the prompt shown at the end of the curl command execution (./clickhouse install) places the configuration files here mostly:

/etc/
└── clickhouse-server/
    ├── config.d/
    │   ├── data-paths.xml
    │   ├── logger.xml
    │   ├── user-directories.xml
    │   └── openssl.xml
    └── users.d/

There's no ./clickhouse uninstall though, so probably I'd recommend to follow the Production Deployment if you're using ClickHouse for production otherwise just run the binary from a folder of your choosing.

I've opened a PR to update the quick-start guide to prompt the user to download the binary to a new clean subdirectory and warn them that running the server will generate some folders and files.

I think we want to keep the quick-start intentionally brief without diving too much into configuration details, but we should definitely link to an appropriate explainer on configuration as a next step. Maybe here? (This page probably needs some improvement too).

What do you think?