Developing your own app using Open OnDemand

We provide applications on Open OnDemand based on software usage/user requests, but OnDemand also provides a way to develop or deploy additional applications developed by the OnDemand organization, or FASRC’s GitHub apps RStudio, Jupyter, or Matlab.

You will need to follow the steps below to enable the development option in the OnDemand menu.

To enable your development environment you should:

1. connect to FAS-OnDemand for Cannon or FASSE

2.  open a shell from the OnDemand or connect to a login nods and then create the development folder as mkdir $HOME/.fasrcood/dev . On FASSE cluster, the folder is $HOME/.fasseood/dev.

3. Now restart the webserver going to OnDemand.
4. Now you can access your sandbox development environment, either clicking on the item in the Develop menu in the dashboard, or simply navigating from the shell to $HOME/<OnDemand_folder>/dev and create an app folder in there and start your development.                                     

Once your dev path is created, you can start working on applications there.

One way to get started is to check out an app from https://osc.github.io/ood-documentation/latest/install-ihpc-apps.html and update the module names/versions and launch the application.       

Another option is to use FASRC’s Jupyter, RStudio , or Matlab apps, you can git clone these into the dev folder as below, restart the webserver and go to My Sandbox Apps to access.

git clone https://github.com/fasrc/ood-rstudio-rocker

To make the application work, you may need to update some files:

https://github.com/fasrc/ood-rstudio-rocker/blob/master/form.yml

cluster:"odyssey3" or "fasse" based on cluster

bc_queue:"shared" or "fasse".  You may need to update number of cores also based on the cluster and partition.

r_version:

options: if you have create a new singularity image, you can specify it as an option here.

 

A previous version of the RStudio app listed the Singularity container location directly in the script file:

https://github.com/fasrc/fas-ondemand-rstudio/blob/master/template/script.sh.erb

This file has the location for the Singularity container and this location is not accessible on the Cannon or FASSE cluster so you need to update the location of the container based on the container you have created.

Feel free to reach out to rchelp@rc.fas.harvard.edu or visit our office hours to help deploy a container or answer further questions.