Updating Cluster Recipes

Once a cluster is deployed, the YAML, postprocessing and configuration files are likely to become substantially different from the original cluster recipe over time. When it is time to deploy a new version of that cluster, you will probably want to sync up the production changes to the recipe.

This repo contains a helper - util/find_changes, that you can use to identify files that have been changed in a deployment with the cluster recipe as the reference. This script will also check for changes to scripts, so that new functionality added or bugs fixed will also be ported back to this repo.

Cleaning up the YAML Files

Before you run find_changes, you will want to scrub the deployment YAML files of any settings that don't need to be kept in the template - i.e. deployment paths, mirror locations, installed specs, etc. In the deployment itself, there is a helper script to create YAML templates based off of the build environment's spack.yaml file and any additional YAML in the include directory. Simply run the following:

cd $NCAR_SPACK_ENV_BUILD
bin/templatize_yaml

This will create cleaned-up versions of YAML files and place them into $NCAR_SPACK_ENV_BUILD/templates/yaml.

Backporting Changes to the Recipe

You can now run the find_changes script as follows:

ncar-spack/util/find_changes [-b] [-d] BUILD_ROOT

If you use the -b flag, you will only see files that have changes. If you use the -d flag, a diff will be shown for each file that has been changed.

In any case, keep in mind that the file in the cluster recipe may in fact have changes as well that you wish to keep. Don't simply copy the deployed version into the recipe - think of it as a merge.