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ClientInstallation
In order to use DIRAC services you need to install the DIRAC client. This client is composed of several commands that allow you to manage your jobs (submit, cancel, retrieve results, ...) and manage your data (upload and download files, add entries to data catalogues, etc.) from your computer.
Getting the DIRAC client installed requires several steps. This is a one-time procedure, so once it is installed you can use it for interacting with several DIRAC backends and you can even upgrade to a more recent version of it, when it is available.
The instructions in this page are specifically intended for tutorials. This means that they show basic functionality to quickly get you started using DIRAC. If you need more advanced capabilities you may consider reading the more detailed Getting Started guide.
You need a computer running Linux (almost any distribution will do) or MacOS X. You need to be able to install some software on your computer on user space: super-user privileges are not required to install DIRAC client.
The computer you are going to install the DIRAC client needs to have a working version of Python (v2.4 or later). This is the case of almost any popular distribution of Linux and is also the case of MacOS X, so you shouldn't need to worry about this.
If your preferred computer runs Windows, we suggest you to run a Linux system (e.g. Ubuntu or ScientificLinux) in a virtual machine (you may consider VirtualBox for this). Alternatively, you may want to connect via SSH to any Unix machine where you have an account and install DIRAC client in that machine.
Download the script that will take care of the DIRAC client installation to a directory of your choice, say $HOME/DIRAC. Do:
mkdir -p $HOME/DIRAC cd $HOME/DIRAC wget -O dirac-install --no-check-certificate -np https://raw.github.com/DIRACGrid/DIRAC/master/Core/scripts/dirac-install.py chmod +x dirac-install
If you don't have wget in your machine you can try using curl:
mkdir -p $HOME/DIRAC cd $HOME/DIRAC curl -k --output dirac-install https://raw.github.com/DIRACGrid/DIRAC/master/Core/scripts/dirac-install.py chmod +x dirac-install
If none of the methods above work for you, you can use a browser for downloading the script by clicking here. Save the downloaded script into $HOME/DIRAC and then do:
cd $HOME/DIRAC chmod +x dirac-install.py
Execute the script you downloaded in the previous step. It will download the relevant software packages and configuration files that the organizers have prepared for the tutorial you are attending. The configuration files contain information such as the hostname of DIRAC server your commands will interact with, etc. Do:
cd $HOME/DIRAC ./dirac-install -V cngrid
After a few minutes, you will notice that your directory $HOME/DIRAC has been populated with some files and subdirectories. In particular, you will find a *.cfg file as well as two files named bashrc and cshrc. Those two latter files contain the instructions to your shell for setting up your working environment so the DIRAC client commands are available to you. They will set up a few environmental variables such as $PATH and $LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
In you are using BASH shell, you can activate your DIRAC client installation with the command:
source $HOME/DIRAC/bashrc
Alternatively, if your shell is TCSH do:
source $HOME/DIRAC/cshrc
You may want to add this line to your shell initialization scripts ($HOME/.bash_profile or $HOME/.tcshrc for BASH or TCSH, respectively) so that the DIRAC commands be available every time to log in.