Moving Shell Access to apps

Feature Requests and Roadmap Discussion
1

For single-cluster OpenOnDemand deployments, it feels a bit odd to have a top-level menu item called “Clusters” that points to a single shell link. To me it would make more sense to have this listed as an app or promote it to a top-level link. I think I remember there being some discussion about this on the mailing list, but I figured it’d be good to bring up here.

Any plans to make dashboard menu items configurable without editing source?
If not, what is the best way to drop our changes in that will hopefully continue to work with future releases?

2

If you want to modify it now you could modify /var/www/ood/apps/sys/shell/manifest.yml and change the category: Clusters to something else. You can also add subcategory: for a subcategory of that menu. In 1.4 and 1.5 this new menu will just display if it doesn’t exist, but in 1.3 you have to do some extra configuration to get it to display if it isn’t already there (see docs with a convoluted explanation).

This is an interesting and timely request. Would you be willing to make a bullet list of the current navbar you currently have and what you would like to be able to change it to? For example, one of our test installs has 3 clusters and our menu would be:

  • Files
    • Home Directory
  • Jobs
    • Active Jobs
    • Job Composer
  • Clusters
    • Owens Shell Access
    • Pitzer Shell Access
  • Interactive Apps
    • Desktops
      • Owens Desktop
      • Pitzer Desktop
      • Owens VDI
      • Pitzer VDI
    • GUIs
      • ParaView
    • Servers
      • Jupyter + Spark

We are just adding basic support for internationalization/localization and that might be an option for renaming the category of a specific app. Long term I think we want to support more customization of the launch interface without admins having to introduce code modifications.

3

Note I will say that using a locales file to modify the navigation organization does seem like an abuse of the feature - but it definitely would be easier to implement. There might be a better way though.

4

We have mused about abusing locales on our different clusters, but never got past that. Interesting Idea.

For now and near future we plan on having a 1:1 ood:cluster instance ratio, primarily due to file access and home directories.

As for menus
I was thinking something like:

  • Files
    • Home Directory
    • Project Directory
    • Scratch Directory
  • Jobs
    • Active Jobs
    • Job Composer
  • (Interactive) Apps
    • Shell
    • Desktop
    • Servers
      • Jupyter
      • Rstudio

Though the shell is the only one that doesn’t immediately result in the submission of a job, I think to a new/naive user it probably would belong there.