Pro Tips

Useful Variables

A lot of Hop’s default behavior can be customized through global variables. Check full list of variables to check them all. A couple of useful and often overlooked environment variables can be set (outside of Hop):

HOP_AUDIT_FOLDER

Set this variable to a valid path on your machine to store Hop’s audit information. This information includes last opened files per project, zoom size and lots more.

HOP_CONFIG_FOLDER

Hop stores your configuration in the config folder by default. Set this environment variable to point to a folder outside of your Hop installation to keep your configuration, projects and environment list etc, no matter which Hop version or installation you use.

copy the contents of an existing hop/conf folder to the path set in HOP_CONFIG_FOLDER to move the configuration from one of your Hop installations to your new central location.
HOP_PLUGIN_BASE_FOLDERS

Set this variable to point Hop to a comma separated list of folders where you want Hop to look for additional plugins.

When using this variable it will also unset your default plugins folder, make sure to add the default plugin folder to the comma separated list. This can be a relative path to the installation eg. export HOP_PLUGIN_BASE_FOLDERS=./plugins,/additional/plugin/folder.
The ./plugins will point to the plugins in the base installation folder
HOP_SHARED_JDBC_FOLDERS

This is a comma separated list of folder containing JDBC drivers, default value is lib/jdbc. If you still need the default jdbc drivers when changing this you need to include the default folder path.

HOP_WINDOWS_SHELL_ENCODING

This variable is for Windows users. It is possible that the shell encoding (the things you see in the CMD window) does not match your system encoding. This can cause confusion when using special characters in logging and Shell Action/transform. You can determine which codepage/encoding your system is using by executing following command in Powershell [System.Text.Encoding]::Default. You can then use the value shown at WindowsCodePage and set the HOP_WINDOWS_SHELL_ENCODING parameter to this value.

To set Windows Variables go to System → System Properties → Environment Variables and define this on user or system scope

Keyboard Shortcuts and Mouse actions

CTRL-K

In any table view in a Hop dialog, select one or more lines and use CTRL-K to remove all lines but your selection

CTRL-SHIFT-Click

Hover your mouse pointer over any pipeline action in a workflow, pipeline or workflow executor transform etc and use CTRL-SHIFT-Click to open that item in a new tab. The same behavior can be triggered by hovering over an item and hitting the Z key.

Copy as pipeline action

In any pipeline or workflow, click anywhere on the canvas and choose 'Copy as pipeline action' or 'Copy as workflow action'. The selected pipeline or workflow can now be pasted (CTRL-V) as a fully configured workflow or pipeline action in any workflow.

Transform hover + SPACE

In a pipeline, hover over any transform and hit SPACE to show the list of output fields for the selected transform.

Action or transform hover + Z

Hover your mouse pointer over any pipeline action in a workflow, pipeline or workflow executor transform etc and hit the Z key to open that item in a new tab. The same behavior can be triggered by hovering over an item and hitting the use CTRL-SHIFT-Click key combination.

Projects and Environments

  • Projects can inherit metadata items (e.g. database connections) from parent projects. Use parent projects to reuse metadata items across multiple projects.

  • a best practice rather than a pro tip: use project variables only for variables that are valid across all environments. Variable that have different values in different environments should be created on the environment level.