Source Control $LastChangedRevision: 1188 $
Abstract
The impatient may find the Swift Really Quick Start Guide to be more convenient. This guide describes the steps needed to download, install, configure, and run the basic examples for Swift. If you are using a pre-installed version of Swift, you can skip directly to the configuration section.
Table of Contents
There are three main ways of getting the Swift implementation: stable releases, nightly builds, and the source code repository.
Stable releases can be obtained from the Swift download page: Swift Downloads Page. Once you downloaded the package, please move to the install section.
Swift builds and tests are being run every day. The Swift downloads page contains links to the latest build and test page. The nightly builds reflect a development version of the Swift code and should not be used in production mode. After downloading a nightly build package, please continue to the install section.
Details about accessing the Swift source repository together with
build instructions are available on the Swift
downloads page. Once built, the dist/vdsk-<version> directory
will contain a self-contained build which can be moved to a
desired location. For simplicity this directory will be called
$SWIFT_HOME
Simply unpack the downloaded package (vdsk-<version>.tar.gz) into a
directory of your choice:
>tar-xzvfvdsk-<version>.tar.gz
This will create a vdsk-<version> directory
containing the build. For simplicity this directory will be refered
to as $SWIFT_HOME
This section describes configuration steps that need to be taken in
order to get Swift running. Since all command line tools provided
with Swift can be found in the $SWIFT_HOME/binPATH
environment variable:
>exportPATH=:$SWIFT_HOME/bin$PATH
If you are installing Swift on a machine with access to a graphical display, you can run the cog-setup tool to configure various aspects of the environment required by Swift.
For local execution of jobs, no grid security configuration is necessary.
However, when submitting jobs to a remote machine using Globus Toolkit services, Swift makes use of the Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI) for authentication and authorization. The requirements for this are detailed in the following sections. Note that GSI is not required to be configured for local execution (which will usually be the case when first starting with Swift).
GSI requires a certificate/private key
pair for authentication to
Globus Toolkit
services. The certificate and private key should
be placed into the ~/.globus/usercert.pem and ~/.globus/userkey.pem files,
respectively.
The Swift client libraries are generally required to authenticate
the services to which they connect. This process requires the
presence on the Swift submit site of the root certificates used
to sign the host certificates of services used. These root
certificates need to be installed in either (or both) the
~/.globus/certificates
and /etc/grid-security/certificates
directories. A package with the root certificates of the
certificate authorities used in the TeraGrid can be found
here.
A Swift properties file (named swift.properties) can be used to
customize certain configuration aspects of Swift. A shared
version of this file, $SWIFT_HOME/etc/swift.properties~/.swift/swift.properties can be used for
user specific settings. Swift first loads the shared
configuration file and, if present, the user configuration file.
Any properties not explicitly set in the user configuration file
will be inherited from the shared configuration file. Properties
are specified in the following format:
name=value
For details about the various properties Swift accepts, please take a look at the Swift Properties Section in the Swift User Guide.
The Swift examples can be found in the <SWIFT_HOME>/examples directory.
The examples are written in the SwiftScript
Language, and have .swift as
a file extension.
The Grid Security Infrastructure, which Swift uses, works with limited time certificates called proxies. These proxies can be generated from your user certificate and private key using one of grid-proxy-init or cog-proxy-init (the latter being a Java Swing interface to the former).
Execution of a Swift workflow is done using the swift command, which takes the Swift workflow file name as an argument:
>swiftexample.swift
The Swift Command Options Section in the Swift User Guide contains details about the various options of the swift.