v2.0 Release Notes

Warning

There are some breaking changes in 2.0. See the upgrade directions below for details.

Highlights in 2.0:

Upgrading to v2.0.29

Major Changes

Require NodeJS 14

NodeJS 14 is now required as NodeJS 12 is currently End-Of-Life.

Upgrade directions

sudo yum update ondemand

Upgrading from v1.8

Breaking Changes

No longer providing ood_auth_map.regex

2.0 no longer provides /opt/ood/ood_auth_map/bin/ood_auth_map.regex, the 1.8- default user_map_cmd in ood_portal.yml.

Most sites should be able to use user_map_match instead. You can still use user_map_cmd, only you’ll have to write your own in a language of your choice.

Warning

lua patterns may not be sufficient because they are not regular expressions. For example they do not support boolean OR | operators. If you need such functionality you may find python, perl, ruby (SCL or system installed) or even bash commands that suite your needs.

See the documentation on user_map_match for more information on it.

SCL Ruby no longer available to apache

Related to the ood_auth_map.regex change above, apache no longer relies on the SCL version of Ruby. This means that Ruby 2.7 is unavailable to apache and consequently any user_map_cmd you employ.

Should you need Ruby 2.7 in any commands or scripts that apache calls, the best mitigation is to employ a wrapper script that can load rh-ruby27.

App sharing landing page

If your site has enabled app sharing through OOD_APP_SHARING the dashboard’s landing page will no longer show these app icons by default.

Your site will need to use the pinned apps feature to have the same look as 1.8.20-. Here is the relevant configuration you’ll need to provide to have a comparable landing page layout.

# /etc/ood/config/ondemand.d/ondemand.yml
pinned_apps:
  - 'usr/*'

pinned_apps_group_by: 'category'

See the documentation on pinning apps to the dashboard for more details.

Ruby and bundler updates

Open OnDemand 2.0 now uses Ruby 2.7, up from 2.5. If you have Passenger apps that have been built against 2.5, these will need to be rebuilt against 2.7.

This release also updates bundler to 2.1.4, up from 1.17.3. These versions are incompatible with each other, so passenger apps will also need to update their bundler dependencies.

ActiveJobs configuration changes

Because ActiveJobs is now integrated with the Dashboard app, configuration files are no longer being read from /etc/ood/config/apps/activejobs.

If you have initializers here in this directory, they need to move to /etc/ood/config/apps/dashboard/initializers. Similarly views, if any, need to move to /etc/ood/config/apps/dashboard/views.

If you used the class Filter to add or modify the filter menus in an initializer, this now needs to be ActiveJobs::Filter.

Files app configuration changes

Because Files app is now integrated with the Dashboard app, configurations in /etc/ood/config/apps/files need to move to /etc/ood/config/apps/dashboard for them to take effect.

The use of the environment variable OOD_SHELL to hide the Terminal button has been deprecated and can now be set with the files_enable_shell_button parameter in the /etc/ood/config/ondemand.d/*.yml file.

Changes to the interactive cards

The interactive sessions cards have changed with the bootstrap 4 upgrade. If your site uses complex logic in your view.html.erb you may have to change that. Here are the two changes that may affect your site.

  1. The panel css classes no longer exist. These have been replaced by card. Here are examples in both plain javascript and jquery of what you may have and how it would need to change.

// there is no closes panel to this element anymore. This won't work, because
// there are no elements with a 'panel' css class.
document.getElementById("someElementId").closest(".panel").id;

// search for the closest element with a card class instead
document.getElementById("someElementId").closest(".card").id;

// the same thing in jquery
$("#someElementId").closest(".card")[0].id

  1. The id of the card divs has changed to prepend id_ to them to fix some issues in Bootstrap-4. So if you use <%= session_id > to query for elements you will either need to prepend id_ to that or change the query to look for the data-id attribute of a div.

    Note

    <%= session_id > doesn’t work directly. You would need to pass it back through the conn_params for it to be usable in this view.

// searching for cards like this will no longer work because the id of the cards has changed.
document.getElementById("<= session_id >");
$("#<= session_id >"); // same thing in jquery


// you will now have to prepend the string 'id_' to them
document.getElementById("id_<= session_id >");
$("#id_<= session_id >"); // same thing in jquery

// the original session id is still stored in the attribute data-id, so this
// works in jquery
$("div[data-id='<%= session_id >']")

Upgrade directions

Warning

As always please update the development or test instances of OnDemand installed at your center first to test and verify before you modify the production instance.

Warning

The OnDemand upgrade has only been tested going from 1.8.x to 2.0.x.

  1. Update OnDemand release RPM

    sudo yum install -y https://yum.osc.edu/ondemand/2.0/ondemand-release-web-2.0-1.noarch.rpm

  2. Enable dependency repos

    CentOS/RHEL 8 only

    sudo dnf module reset ruby
sudo dnf module enable ruby:2.7
sudo dnf module reset nodejs
sudo dnf module enable nodejs:12

    RedHat 8 only

    sudo subscription-manager repos --enable codeready-builder-for-rhel-8-x86_64-rpms

    CentOS 8 only

    sudo dnf config-manager --set-enabled powertools

    CentOS/RHEL 7 only

    sudo yum install epel-release

  3. Update OnDemand

    sudo yum clean all
sudo yum update ondemand

  4. (Optional) If using Dex based authentication, update the ondemand-dex package.

    sudo yum update ondemand-dex

  5. Update Apache configuration and restart Apache.

    sudo /opt/ood/ood-portal-generator/sbin/update_ood_portal

    CentOS/RHEL 8 only

    sudo systemctl try-restart httpd

    CentOS/RHEL 7 only

    sudo systemctl try-restart httpd24-httpd.service

  6. (Optional) If ondemand-dex was installed, restart the ondemand-dex service.

    sudo systemctl try-restart ondemand-dex.service

  7. Force all PUNs to restart

    sudo /opt/ood/nginx_stage/sbin/nginx_stage nginx_clean -f

  8. (Optional) Remove old dependencies from prior versions of OOD if they are not used by other applications.

    Warning

    See Dependency updates warning before uninstalling old Ruby versions.

    CentOS/RHEL 7 only

    sudo yum remove rh-ruby25\* rh-nodejs10\*

Details

Pinned Apps: Enhanced app launch interface using large app icons on the dashboard

As the number of apps increases and the sophistication of the typical user decreases - now including even undergraduate students using OnDemand in the classroom - it has become desirable to be able to present only a small subset of the apps that are relevant for a particular user.

2.0 now allows sites to pin a grid of application icons to the dashboard for easy access and to a subset of apps that you want to feature. The grid layout of application icons is meant to give users a desktop look and feel to the dashboard.

There are several strategies available to choose which apps to pin. For example, metadata in the app manifests could specify a field_of_science attribute, and then the pinned apps could be configured to display all apps with the field_of_science being “Biology”. The configuration for pinned apps can be made dynamic using ERB so it can be changed based on which user or group is accessing the dashboard. Pinned apps can also further be grouped by a particular attribute.

See the documentation on pinning apps to the dashboard for details.

Custom dashboard widgets and layout

See the documentation on customizing dashboard layouts for details.

Adding metadata to app manifests

App manifest files now allow for metadata fields for grouping and display in the all apps table. See documentation on manifest files for more details.

Shell app now has themes

The shell app now allows for users to choose a color theme other than the default and ships with thirteen extra themes.

Configurations in an ondemand.d directory

We’ve added an ondemand.d directory to start moving configurations there. Some new features for 2.0 rely on configurations read from files in this directory.

See the documentation for the ondemand.d configurations for all the available configurations.

Tighter integration between the Dashboard, Active Jobs, and Files apps

In OnDemand 1.8, the Dashboard, Active Jobs, Files, and File Editor apps were all served by separate Passenger application processes. These are all now served by a single Passenger application process per user.

This change has the following effects:

  • The URL has changed, but redirects from the old URLs should still work for backwards compatibility.

  • The navbar and branding across the dashboard is visible in Active Jobs and File Editor

  • the Active Jobs and Files apps both load without opening a new window

  • the Active Jobs and Files apps load much faster than before

Warning

Configuration for Active Jobs and Files apps have changed slightly and need to be updated for 2.0. See Breaking Changes above for details.

New File Manager app

The Files app in 1.8 was a fork of https://github.com/coderaiser/cloudcmd that was difficult to maintain. The new Files app is rewritten in Ruby and integrated into the Dashboard app. The look and feel has been updated to use Bootstrap 4 and the OnDemand navbar displays above the interface.

New features:

  • Modified at column now shows date and time

  • Columns are sortable by size, date, name, type, etc.

  • Owner column displays the actual username instead of just the UID

  • Uploads now managed with Uppy.js which provides a preview window prior to uploading files

  • Copy path button provides easy way to copy the current directory path to clipboard

  • Copy, Move, and Delete events now log details of the action requested in the per user NGINX logs

  • Copy, Move workflow includes a new visual display of the files selected to copy or move

  • Filter box to filter the list of files by inserted text

Changes:

  • The left hand navigation tree is replaced with a list of the file location shortcuts

  • Instead of a “..” row to navigate up, there is an “up” button to the left of the path

  • Buttons that apply to only one file or directory were moved to a button dropdown to the right of each filename

  • “Change directory” button replaced “Go to” button

  • Open in Terminal now displays split dropdown button to ssh to any available login host without any extra configuration required. Previously this was done by setting an SSH_HOSTS env var

See the files app configuration changes for any changes you’ll need to update to the configurations of this new app.

../_images/2.0_files_app.png

Changes in All Apps page layout

The ‘All Apps’ page is now a filterable table instead of cards. Note that new columns will be dynamically added by adding metadata to app manifests.

ERB formats for Message of the day

The message of the day text and markdown formats now support ERB rendering for a more dynamic message being rendered. See the documentation on Message of the Day for more information.

Memcached Ruby gem available for use in apps

The “dalli” Ruby gem for interfacing with memcached can now be used in batch connect apps though it needs to be explicitly required using a custom initializer or in the form or submit erb files.

Dependency updates

This release updates the following dependencies:

  • Ruby 2.7

  • NodeJS 12

  • Passenger 6.0.7

  • NGINX 1.18.0

    Warning

    The change in Ruby version means any Ruby based apps that are not provided by the OnDemand RPM must be rebuilt.