DIRAC

DIRAC is an interware, meaning a software framework for distributed computing.

DIRAC provides a complete solution to one or more user community requiring access to distributed resources. DIRAC builds a layer between the users and the resources offering a common interface to a number of heterogeneous providers, integrating them in a seamless manner, providing interoperability, at the same time as an optimized, transparent and reliable usage of the resources.

DIRAC has been started by the LHCb collaboration who still maintains it. It is now used by several communities (AKA VO=Virtual Organizations) for their distributed computing workflows.

DIRAC is written in python 2.7.13 and transitioning to python 3.

Status v7r2 series (stable):

Status v7r3 series (stable, recommended):

Status integration branch (devel):

Important links

• Official source code repo: https://github.com/DIRACGrid/DIRAC
• HTML documentation (stable release): http://diracgrid.org (http://dirac.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html)
• Issue tracker: https://github.com/DIRACGrid/DIRAC/issues
• Support Mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/diracgrid-forum

Install

There are basically 2 types of installations: client, and server.

For DIRAC client installation instructions, see the web page.

For DIRAC server installation instructions, see the web page.

For python 2 installations, the supported distributions are EL7 (e.g. CC7).

As of DIRAC 7.2 there is also experimental support for Python 3 based clients (which are to considered production level from DIRAC 7.3). As of DIRAC 7.3 there is also experimental support for Python 3 based servers (which are to considered production level from DIRAC 8.0). We recommend transitioning to Python 3 clients during using DIRAC 7.2 and Python 3 servers using DIRAC 7.3.

There are three available options for installation:

1. DIRACOS2: This is the only fully supported method, see the DIRACOS 2 documentation.

2. Conda / Mamba from conda-forge : We recommend making a new environment for DIRAC using

   mamba create --name my-dirac-env -c conda-forge dirac-grid
   conda activate my-dirac-env

3. Pip: Provided suitable dependencies are available DIRAC can be installed with pip install DIRAC. Support for installing the dependencies should be sought from the upstream projects.

Development

For the full development guide see here, some of the most important details are included below.

Contributing

DIRAC is a fully open source project, and you are welcome to contribute to it. A list of its main authors can be found here A detailed explanation on how to contribute to DIRAC can be found in this page. For a quick'n dirty guide on how to contribute, simply:

• Fork the project inside the GitHub UI

• Clone locally and create a branch for each change

  git clone git@github.com:$GITHUB_USERNAME/DIRAC.git
  cd DIRAC
  git remote add upstream git@github.com:DIRACGrid/DIRAC.git
  git fetch --all
  git checkout upstream/integration
  git checkout -b my-feature-branch
  git push -u origin my-feature-branch

• Create a Pull Request, targeting the "integration" branch.

Code quality

To ensure the code meets DIRAC's coding conventions we recommend installing pre-commit system wide using your operating system's package manager. Alteratively, pre-commit is included in the Python 3 development environment, see the development guide for details on how to create one.

Once pre-commit is installed you can enable it by running:

pre-commit install --allow-missing-config

Code formatting will now be automatically applied before each commit.

Testing

Unit tests are provided within the source code and can be ran using pytest. Integration, regression and system tests are instead in the DIRAC/tests/ directory.

Acknowledgements

This work is co-funded by the EOSC-hub project (Horizon 2020) under Grant number 777536