Project Manager

Overview

Setup

For individual projects, there is no setup required. Anybody with the permissions to submit jobs to your scheduler will also be able to use all of the launcher and workflow tools of the Project Manager after updating to v4.1. In order for users to collaborate together they will need a properly configured shared directory, meeting these minimum permissions

Collaboration

Collaborative projects need properly configured directories to exist in, which may vary on the types of collaboration you would like to enable. Like other actions in Open OnDemand, it will operate as the logged in user and never exceed the UNIX permissions of the directories and files it operates on. This means there are several different approaches you may want to take depending on your file system's account and permission management approach.

Shared Project Root

The project manager provides the OOD_SHARED_PROJECT_ROOT environment variable to help potential collaborators discover potential projects to import. While this is not necessary for collaboration, it is a recommended step to make it easier to locate. The OOD_SHARED_PROJECT_ROOT is a list of base locations for shared projects, allowing you to add as many locations as you need for different types of users and projects. The Project Manager will only allow users to import projects from locations that they have access to, so there is no danger in adding paths that are not accessible to certain users.

Because many centers use group-based permission schemes, the Project Manager expects that each directory in OOD_SHARED_PROJECT_ROOT has a set of subdirectories with finer permissions, and will only look for projects in these subdirectories.

For example, a center may have a shared project folder /fs/shared/projects, and a series of subdirectories /fs/shared/projects/developers, /fs/shared/projects/staff, /fs/shared/projects/students.

In this example, they would set OOD_SHARED_PROJECT_ROOT=/fs/shared/projects, allowing developers to create collaborative projects like /fs/shared/projects/developers/project1, which are then easily accessible to others in the developers group (likewise for staff and students).

While the Project Manager automates the permissions settings on project-specific folders, these can never exceed the permissions of the SHARED_PROJECT_ROOT or any group-level subdirectory, so it is important to ensure that your directory structure meets these minimum requirements.

  1. Any directory in OOD_SHARED_PROJECT_ROOT and above must have at minimum r-x permissions for all potential collaborators.

  2. Any group directory directly below OOD_SHARED_PROJECT_ROOT should have rws permissions for the group, as well as a T sticky bit to prevent unwanted deletions.