Tool users

Everything a hub member needs in order to run a tool is written up in the users book, which covers the whole hub rather than the tool platform alone. This page says which chapter to read for what. The rest of this book is for the people who build tools and the people who run the hub.

Running a tool

Tools is the chapter to read. It covers:

• Launching a session from a tool's page, and what the controls across the top of the session page do — keeping a session for later, terminating it, renaming it, and choosing a viewer.
• Your files: a session sees your home directory on the hub, not your own computer.
• Sharing a session with other members or with a group, read-only or not.

The animation shows a tool session in an older hub interface; the surrounding page looks different now, but the arrangement — the tool in a frame, its controls above it, the storage meter below — is the same.

New to the hub altogether? Start with Getting started, which walks through registering and finding your way around, and Introduction, which explains how the member area is laid out.

Usage figures

• Usage — the Usage tab on your own profile, which of its figures are computed live, and which need statistics collection the hub has to set up separately.
• Simulation usage definitions — what each figure on the hub-wide usage pages counts.

Contributing a tool of your own

Contributing a tool describes what can be hosted and walks the contribution pipeline from registration to a published tool page. Note that the Rappture toolkit, long the usual way to put an interface on a command-line program, is deprecated; a Jupyter notebook is the current path on most hubs.

Once you have registered a tool, the detail lives elsewhere in this book:

• Tool developers — repository layout, invoke scripts, tool paths and environment variables, moving files in and out of a session, the submit command for cluster jobs, and Jupyter notebooks as tools.
• Tool administrators — what the hub's staff do on their side: tool dependencies, the directory parameter whitelist, and the Anaconda environments behind Jupyter kernels.

Hub staff running the pipeline should read Tools in the hub managers book.

Pages that moved

Five chapters that used to sit here duplicated the users book and now point at it, so there is one reviewed version rather than two that disagree: Introduction, Tools, Simulation usage definitions, Usage, and Getting started.