Purpose

Software packages are constently being updated with newer versions at most HPC centers. As a result, any service that involves listing current versions of software modules must be updated frequently. One such service is OOD.

To automate the form updates with the latest module list for each software package served through the portal, I developed this dynamic form generation scheme that will keep up with the pace of module updates on a HPC system.

Create the template form

The file template.yml.erb serves as a template to generate the real application forms. First, you need to edit the form and attribute secitons of template.yml.erb. You need to make sure that each form entry and its attributes are what you want.

The key parts of the template file are the two segments of ruby code embeded into the yml file.

<%
app_name = __app_name__
app_root = __app_root__+app_name
%>

    label: <%= app_name %> version
    options:
      <% IO.foreach(app_root+"/modules") do |line| %>
      <%= line %>
      <% end %>

__app_name__ and __app_root__ are just place holder and will be replaced with real App name and the actual root location of all the module list files after setup.sh is run.

Setup

Create a list of Apps you will deploy with the dynamic module listing scheme and put them into a file called app.list, one App a line.

Now run this command

sudo ./setup.sh -p path -f app.list

What setup.sh does is to generate a form.yml.erb for every App listed in app.list and copy it to /var/www/ood/apps/sys/app_name. If there is a form.yml existing, it will be renamed as form.yml.bak.

path is a parameter for the root path where all the module list files are stored. In the following example, path will be /usr/local/ood-dynamic-module-list.

/usr/local/ood-dynamic-module-list
├── matlab
│   └── modules
├── abaqus
│   └── modules
└── comsol
    └── modules

Module list for the Apps

Now run the module list generator

sudo gen_module_list.sh -p path -f app.list

This script will generate the module list files as shown in the above example.

A sample modules looks like this:

- [ "MATLAB/2016b" ]
- [ "MATLAB/2017b" ]
- [ "MATLAB/2018b" ]
- [ "MATLAB/2019a" ]

Cron job

To automate the module list generation, you need to create a cron job which runs gen_module_list.sh once every day.