Flight Runway

A base platform/environment for managing and executing OpenFlight tools.

Overview

Commands

• flight (and fl) - main entry point for execution of OpenFlight tools.
• flexec - shorthand to execute a binary within the Flight Runway environment (for e.g. irb, bundle etc.).
• flenable - configure system-wide or user profile scripts to integrate Flight Runway with your environment.
• flactivate - execute a bash shell preconfigured for use with Flight Runway.
• flintegrate - install an OpenFlight tool using a tool descriptor file. [DEPRECATED]

Installation

From the OpenFlight yum repository

The recommended installation method is to use the RPM provided for installation on Enterprise Linux 7 series distributions, e.g. CentOS 7:

1. Set up the yum repository on your system. This will install both the main and development repositories (with dev disabled by default)

   yum install https://repo.openflighthpc.org/openflight/centos/7/x86_64/openflighthpc-release-2-1.noarch.rpm
   

2. Rebuild your yum cache:

   yum makecache
   

3. Install the flight-runway RPM with yum:

   yum install flight-runway
   

Manual installation

While manual installation is not normally required, if you're not using Enterprise Linux or want to set things up yourself directly from the repository, you can do so by following the steps below.

Prerequisites

You will need a functional Ruby 2.5+ environment (one installed via RVM or similar works well) along with the Bundler tool.

Steps

1. Clone the repository into /opt/flight

   cd /opt
   git clone https://github.com/openflighthpc/flight-runway flight

2. Replace the convenience wrappers with symlinks to the programs supplied by your Ruby environment:

   cd /opt/flight/bin
   for a in bundle gem irb rake ruby 
     rm -f $a
     ln -s $(which $a) $a
   done

3. Place scripts and configuration files from the pkg/ directory in the expected locations:

   cd /opt/flight
   mv pkg/bin/flintegrate bin/flintegrate
   mkdir -p /opt/flight/opt/runway
   mv pkg/dist /opt/flight/opt/runway
   rmdir pkg

Configuration

Once Flight Runway is installed, you can choose one of the following options for integrating Flight Runway into your environment:

No integration

You can operate Flight Runway without integrating it in your environment. Address binaries using their absolute paths, e.g.:

[chrisdemo@localhost ~]$ /opt/flight/bin/flight

Alternatively start a bash shell with the flactivate command which is preconfigured for use of the Flight Runway tools:

[chrisdemo@localhost ~]$ /opt/flight/bin/flactivate
(flight) [chrisdemo@localhost ~]$ flight
Usage: flight COMMAND [[OPTION]... [ARGS]]
Perform high performance computing management activities.

Commands:
  flight help             Display help and usage information.
  flight shell            Enter a shell-like sandbox for a Flight command.

For more help on a particular command run:
  flight COMMAND help

Please report bugs to <flight@openflighthpc.org>
OpenFlightHPC home page: <https://openflighthpc.org/>

Integration with your PATH

The simplest way to make Flight Runway available is by adding the /opt/flight/bin directory to your PATH environment variable:

[chrisdemo@localhost ~]$ PATH=/opt/flight/bin:$PATH
[chrisdemo@localhost ~]$ flight

Make the above change manually or by adding it to your ~/.bash_profile (or similar for your preferred shell).

System-wide integration

Use the flenable tool as the superuser to make Flight Runway available to all users on your system by integrating it with /etc/profile.d scripts:

[root@localhost flight-runway]# /opt/flight/bin/flenable
Install system-wide profile scripts (Y/n)? y
Installing profile scripts to /etc/profile.d...  OK

On future login sessions, the flight tool, and its shorthand (fl), are available at the terminal, along with the flexec and flintegrate tools.

User-only integration

If you only want Flight Runway available as a particular user, use the flenable tool to make Flight Runway available by integrating it with your shell profile scripts:

[chrisdemo@localhost ~]$ /opt/flight/bin/flenable
Install to /home/chrisdemo/.bashrc (Y/n)? y
Installing to /home/chrisdemo/.bashrc...  OK

On future login sessions, the flight tool, and its shorthand (fl), are available at the terminal, along with the flexec and flintegrate tools.

Installing and integrating tools

With Flight Runway up and running you'll probably want to install one or more of the OpenFlight tools. This is achieved using yum alongside the OpenFlight repository.

This is the recommended method for installing and integrating OpenFlight tools with Runway so the repository and Flight Runway should have been installed as described in the installation section.

Presuming that the OpenFlight repositories are in place, tools can be searched for as follows:

yum search flight-*

The chosen tools can then be installed using yum as normal:

yum install flight-starter flight-env flight-desktop

Installing and integrating tools [DEPRECATED]

Note: Installing additional tools with flintegrate is a deprecated process. All tools are now available through the OpenFlight yum repository

With Flight Runway up and running you'll probably want to install one or more of the OpenFlight tools. This is facilitated by using the flintegrate command which takes a tool descriptor file and integrates the command into the Flight Runway environment.

You can find a set of tool descriptors in the openflight-tools repository. First clone the repo:

cd $HOME
git clone https://github.com/openflighthpc/openflight-tools 

With the tool descriptors available, use one of the following methods for installation/integration of a tool:

Using defaults specified in the tool descriptor

The simplest installation method is to use the default releases specified in the tool descriptors, e.g.:

flintegrate $HOME/openflight-tools/flight-example.yml

This will download a zip file containing the flight-example tool from the default URL specified in the tool descriptor, unpack it into the /opt/flight/opt/flight-example directory and integrate it according to the instructions held within the tool descriptor.

Upstream zip file

If you want to specify an alternative URL for the upstream source for a tool, specify a URL to a zip file containing the release of the tool you want to use to the flintegrate tool:

flintegrate $HOME/openflight-tools/flight-example.yml \
  https://github.com/openflighthpc/flight-example/archive/master.zip

This will download the zip file from the specified URL, unpack it to the /opt/flight/opt/flight-example directory and integrate it according to the instructions held within the tool descriptor.

You may specify a target directory as a third argument.

Local directory

This might be a directory that you've already prepared from a clone or unpacked zip file.

flintegrate $HOME/openflight-tools/flight-example.yml \
  /opt/flight/opt/flight-example

No download occurs; the tool that's present in the /opt/flight/opt/flight-example directory is integrated into the Flight Runway environment.

Contributing

Fork the project. Make your feature addition or bug fix. Send a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.

Read CONTRIBUTING.md for more details.

License

Eclipse Public License 2.0, see LICENSE.txt for details.

Copyright (C) 2019-present Alces Flight Ltd.

This program and the accompanying materials are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License 2.0 which is available at https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0, or alternative license terms made available by Alces Flight Ltd - please direct inquiries about licensing to licensing@alces-flight.com.

Flight Runway is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the Eclipse Public License 2.0 for more details.