Configuring applications
Best practices for configuring your applications on Nuvolos
Most Nuvolos applications come with a vast amount of configurable settings, and often they support extra packages, which in turn have their own separate settings. This document describes the recommended way to manage such configurations that most suit your needs.
Persistent locations
Every Nuvolos application is built on top of customized Linux distribution, tuned specifically for performance and security in the cloud. This underlying OS is initialized fresh on each start - this means, even if you can write to some locations like /tmp, changes in these locations are ephemeral, and will disappear with the next restart.
There are 3 locations that do retain changes between restart:
The Workspace files (generally mounted under /files, and hence also referred to as the FILES area)
The Personal files (generally mounted under ~, and hence also referred to as the HOME area)
The Application library files (mount point depends on the app type, also referred to as APP LIBRARY area)
You can check the mount points for these locations in the app's description. If your app has a description, it'll have a clickable description text:
Application start notification
Nuvolos supports sending a notification about your application being ready for use. Once your application has loaded completely, Nuvolos will try to send a system notification. This will pop up a consent window in your browser, where you can accept or reject these notifications.
Nuvolos will only send you notifications about your application being ready to use, nothing else
If you accept the request, Nuvolos will send you notification once your app is ready to be used and the Nuvolos browser window is not in focus. This works both for scaled and normal applications.
If you wish, you can enable/disable these notifications anytime later as well. Note that each browser and operating system manages such notifications at multiple levels. Please consult your browser's/operating system's documentation on how to manage notification permissions.
Some examples:
Configuring applications
Each Nuvolos application has a configuration screen to adjust general settings. You can access this screen with the Configure button next to the action buttons:
The NCU setting is explained in the resource allocation topic, while the inactivity limit is covered in the long running applications section. In this sections the remaining settings are covered.
Run in shared mode
By default, every Nuvolos application is only accessible to the user who has started it. This guarantees that you can work in complete privacy on the platform. However, in many cases like group work, you want to collaborate with other Nuvolos users - this is when shared mode is useful.
If you start an app is shared mode, every user who is allowed to start apps in the instance will have access to the same running application. This has the following implications:
Apps in shared mode are assigned to a special "shared" user. It does not matter which user starts the application - the home folder will always be the home folder of this special "shared" user. It works the same way as for non-shared apps, but since multiple users can access it, consider carefully what kind of privileged information you store there.
For the above reason, personal secrets are generally not propagated in applications running in shared mode. There are a few exceptional applications where they do propagate, but these special apps do not make it possible to extract these secrets from the running app.
The user who has started up the application (the "starter") will see it as a regular Nuvolos application. All other users in the instance will see the running app only if they open the instance of the application. In other words, the shared app's status will not be accurate for them on the quick access cards and in the top navigation bar.
Shared mode might be required by certain applications, for example server-type applications generally require shared mode, as each instance user should have access to the same server, not independent versions of it. In such cases, the shared mode toggle is disabled.
For other applications, you can enable shared mode, but if the applications does not support multiple connections from different users, the experience might not be optimal. For example, RStudio only allows one live session, so it does not make much sense to enable shared mode for RStudio.
Collaborative editing in JupyterLab
There is a particular application where turning on shared mode makes a lot of sense: JupyterLab 4. From JupyterLab 3 to 4, collaborative editing has improved a lot.
We recommend to use collaborative editing only from JupyterLab version 4.0.0 - our tests showed the feature is much more reliable since the latest major release.
To enable collaborative editing in JupyterLab 4, simply enable shared mode for the app. After your restart the Nuvolos application, you'll see a small badge at the top right of JupyterLab with your collaborative editing name.
Some known limitations regarding collaborative editing:
In collaborative editing, you cannot manually save files, JupyterLab will save them 1 seconds after it has detected any changes in the document.
Currently nicknames cannot be chosen in collaborative mode, it'll be the random generated.
If the collaborative framework fails to load due to due to e.g. intermittent network problems, JupyterLab won't be able to open any files. In this case, do a full page reload to re-initialize the framework.
Collaborative mode still does not fix the long outstanding issue with cell output streaming. This means, if you have a long running notebook, and you close your browser window, if you come back you won't be seeing any new message streamed to you in the cell output. To overcome this, we recommend using Papermill for long running notebooks.
In case you encounter issues with collaborative mode for your workflow, you can turn it off completely by issuing the following command in a terminal:
jupyter labextension disable @jupyter/collaboration-extension
You'll need to do a full page reload for the changes to take effect.
Also keep in mind that when collaboration is turned off, autosave is also disabled, so make sure to save your changes regularly.
You can re-enable collaborative mode anytime with the same command, only using enable instead of disable.
Persist sessions data in home area between restarts
Most applications store some state information in the user's home folder. Most of the time it is beneficial, however is a teaching scenario you might prefer to start with a clean slate each time the application start up. If you disable persisting sessions data, any changes in the app's home folder will be discarded upon application stop.
Configuring in-app settings
If you change your app's configuration via its UI (e.g. the font size of an editor window), it will be persistent between restarts, as all Nuvolos apps store their configurations in either the HOME or APP LIBRARY areas. However, there are important differences between the two locations:
Configurations stored in the HOME area are different per Nuvolos user account. This means, even if you distribute configuration files from your Personal folder, they won't be visible in other accounts, only yours.
Configurations stored in the APP LIBRARY area are intrinsic to the application itself. If the app is distributed, these configurations are distributed too, automatically.
Below are some recommended setting for the most common scenarios.
Personal configuration in a collaborative environment
In certain cases, you might have access to e.g. licensed resources your collaborators should not have access to. In this cases, it makes sense to configure your application to store access keys in either environment secrets or files in your HOME area. These will not be shared with your collaborators, even if you explicitly distribute to other instances.
Shared configuration in a collaborative environment
If you're working with collaborators in a space, you might want to configure your application the same way for every user in the space. We recommend the following setup:
Many apps and extensions support storing their configuration in the folder(s) where they are installed. This is the recommended place for storing shared configurations - as these settings automatically distribute along with the app itself.
If the above does not work, many apps still support customizing the location where they read configuration files from. You can use environment variables to customize these locations, and store your configurations in either the FILES or APP LIBRARY areas.
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