Improve docs on enabling app development

Feature Requests and Roadmap Discussion
1

We are resurrecting our OOD installation and I had trouble enabling the app development. Trying to follow https://osc.github.io/ood-documentation/master/app-development/enabling-development-mode.html, I have to admit that I found that document confusing and had to re-read it many times before finally getting it to work. So, I have a few suggestions on that.

  • Itemize the three steps needed to enable the app development as subsections, and detail what needs to be done and what the options are under each subsection (e.g. for the app paths, either the 1.3 or 1.4 way).

  • especially for the paths, make another sub-itemization separately for the 1.3 and 1.4 behavior, so one does not confuse the 1.3 behavior with the 1.4.

  • Then have a separate subsection wrapped around the description of Table 7 = the global enablement of the apps development

  • it is not clear if one needs to set OOD_DEV_APPS_ROOT (and where this variable goes - presumably in the /etc/ood/config/apps/dashboard/env) AND also modify the nginx_stage.yml appropriately). This needs some clarification too.

  • it is not clear OOD_DEV_SSH_HOST needs to be set if I set up the apps on the same OOD server itself. It sounds like in that case OOD_DEV_SSH_HOST is not needed, but, then it should be listed as an “optional” step.

So, bottom line, I recommend itemize and reshuffle the document by first having 2 sub-sections of the necessary steps (the paths to the app_root), and then discuss the optional steps (OOD_DEV_SSH_HOST and the global app development enabling with OOD_APP_DEVELOPMENT).

Thanks,
MC

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2

Thank you for the feedback, will update the documentation. Already an issue on GitHub to track the work.

Is there any background to the reason why you shut down your OOD installation?

3

Thanks Eric. Wrt. the shutdown, you may recall our OOD broke with auto OS update in early January, we could not authenticate (used LDAP) and could not figure out what’s wrong.

We decided to start from the scratch, but it took some time to allocate resources to it. We ended up setting up an OOD-devel machine, put the Keycloak on, and then put Keycloak on our original (user-facing) OOD server, which has fixed the issues on that machine too.

In the meanwhile we have also rolled out a shorter walltime test partition which is ideal for the OOD interactive apps so I hope we’ll get more people using those.

The plan now is to do only occasional updates (both OS and OOD) on the user-facing server (lesson learned) and test updates and new features on the ood-test server.

Thanks,
MC

4

@mcuma does https://osc.github.io/ood-documentation/release-1.6/app-development/enabling-development-mode.html address your concerns?