On 14/10/16 09:45, Ole Holm Nielsen wrote:
Hi Kenneth, Cc: Robert,
I've been trying to set up a default user environment with modules
provided by EasyBuild (EB) and using Lmod. We run CentOS 7.2. The EB
discussion is in this thread:
https://lists.ugent.be/wws/arc/easybuild/2016-10/msg00052.html
My goal is to automatically provide modules built by EB to every
normal user, but not actually loading any modules, since users have
different needs.
Following the Lmod documentation in
http://lmod.readthedocs.io/en/latest/070_standard_modules.html I've
come up with the following shell initialization file
/etc/profile.d/z01_EasyBuild.sh which gets called after Lmod has been
initialized (by z00_lmod.sh):
if [ -z "$__Init_Default_Modules" ]; then
export __Init_Default_Modules=1
export EASYBUILD_MODULES_TOOL=Lmod
export EASYBUILD_PREFIX=/home/modules
module use $EASYBUILD_PREFIX/modules/all
else
module refresh
fi
(obviously, the EASYBUILD_PREFIX is site-dependent). Please note that
I refrain from calling the recommended "module --initial_load
restore". I believe this is unwarranted, unless the sysadmin actually
wants users to always load some specific set of system default modules
- which I don't want to do. I also don't load the EasyBuild module,
because only module builders need to do that, but not the normal users.
It seems to me that the above script would be a suitable minimum setup
for automatic initialization of EB modules.
Question to the experts: Is this approach sound, or do you see any
problems?
Defining $EASYBUILD_PREFIX by default is probably not something you want
to do for everyone, since that instructs EasyBuild to install software
in this location, and I expect that most users won't have write
permissions there?
Other than that, this looks OK to me.
If it seems OK, could you perhaps consider adding the above example to
the mentioned Lmod page as a convenient way to get started (at least
when using EB). I don't know if this usage example is appropriate for
inclusion in the EB documentation, but as a newcomer to EB I certainly
felt the need for a good way to provide EB modules to normal users,
and I had to work hard to solve this problem.
In my Wiki page about Lmod and EasyBuild I've documented the above:
https://wiki.fysik.dtu.dk/niflheim/EasyBuild_modules#global-setup-of-modules-for-all-users
I'm happy to include this in the EasyBuild documentation somewhere, any
suggestions for a particular location? Should it be a new page?
Are you up for making a pull request to the EasyBuild documentation for
this (see the 'docs' subdir in https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild)?
regards,
Kenneth
