Trovi sharing portal

Chameleon Trovi is a sharing portal that allows you to share digital research and education artifacts, such as packaged experiments, workshop tutorials, or class materials. Each research artifact is represented as a deposition (a remotely accessible folder) where a user can put Jupyter notebooks, links to images, orchestration templates, data, software, and other digital representations that together represent a focused contribution that can be run on Chameleon. Users can use these artifacts to recreate and rerun experiments or class exercises on a Jupyter Notebook within Chameleon. They can also create their own artifacts and publish them directly to Trovi from within Chameleon’s Jupyter server.

To get started, find the “Trovi” dropdown option under the “Experiment” section of chameleoncloud.org. Once you’re on the Trovi homepage, you’ll see a list of publicly available experiments and other digital artifacts. You can now browse those artifacts or upload your own.

The “Trovi” option under the “Experiment” section takes you to Trovi.

Browsing artifacts

Trovi allows you to browse artifacts, presented in a scrolling list format. On the right hand side, there are multiple filtering options. The “All” choice shows you all of the artifacts you have access to. You can also see how many times people have downloaded and launched your notebook with the icons in the bottom left corner of an artifact.

Note

Some Trovi artifacts are supported by the Chameleon team and are denoted with a small Chameleon logo. You can contact the Help Desk if you are using these artifacts and encounter issues.

Launching an artifact

The most powerful feature available via Trovi is the ability to re-launch the available artifacts within Chameleon. Clicking “Launch with JupyterHub” will open a new Jupyter Notebook server with the artifacts downloaded (we support artifacts up to 500MB in total size, please contact the Help Desk if you need more space). The animation below shows how easy it is:

Clicking the “Launch with JupyterHub” button to import a Trovi artifact into your own Jupyter server.

Packaging shared artifacts

You can publish new artifacts to Trovi either from your primary Jupyter server or by editing a previously-shared artifact. In the latter case, you are effectively creating a new “forked” artifact owned by you.

When you’ve finished creating or making changes to an experiment, in the Jupyter interface, select the directory (not a single file) you wish to package. Then, click on the “Share” tab and select “Package as a new artifact”. Your artifact is now packaged and uploaded to Chameleon file storage, and you’ll be prompted to fill out descriptions about the artifact. Don’t worry if you want to change this later—you will be able to edit them on the Trovi portal or within Jupyter.

Congratulations! Your artifact is now uploaded to Trovi—but to make it accessible to others you need to adjust its sharing settings.

Saving new versions

If you make changes to your artifact, you can submit an updated version. Within Jupyter, you navigate to the “Sharing” tab, but this time you click “Create new artifact version”. The different versions are viewable on the Trovi portal after clicking on the artifact.

Editing artifacts

You can edit an artifact’s metadata, including its title, description, and list of authors at any time via the Jupyter interface. To delete single artifact versions, click the “trashcan” icon next to it in the edit view. To delete the entire artifact, click the red “Delete All” button.

Note

Any artifacts published to Zenodo cannot be deleted.

This edit view is also available from Trovi via the “Edit” button.

Creating a version from Git

Under an artifact’s edit settings, you will also see a button for creating a new version from Git. This will allow you to enter a Git URL, the same one used to clone your repository, and also a reference (lease as HEAD for the latest commit). When a user launches your artifact, their notebook will checkout the specified commit.

Adjusting sharing settings

When you first upload your packaged artifact to Trovi, its visibility is set as private, meaning only you can see or launch it. There are multiple options to change the visibility of the artifact, and you have the option to decide how visible you want it to be.

1. Publish with DOI: this option allows you to publish a version of your artifact to Zenodo and receive a DOI, which you can use to cite your artifact in, e.g., an academic paper.
2. Publish without DOI: this option allows any Chameleon user to find and launch your artifact. It can be useful if you want to distribute the artifact widely but do not necessarily with to publish it to Zenodo and get a DOI for citation.
3. Share via private link: this option allows you to share the experiment to select people, like individual colleagues, advisors, or students. Anybody in possession of the link can view and launch any version of the artifact.

To make your artifact shareable, select it in Trovi, click “Share”, and check the box before “Enable all users to find and share”.

Assigning Roles to Other Users

You can assign roles to other users which allow them to collaborate on your artifacts. There are two roles: Collaborator and Administrator.

Collaborators are allowed to edit artifact metadata, upload new versions, delete old versions, and share private artifacts.

Administrators have full control over the artifact, including assigning roles to other users.

Artifact owners cannot have their Adminstrator privileges removed.

Publishing to Zenodo

Trovi is intended for sharing work in progress with a limited group of “friends and family”. However, once you complete your experiment package you may want to publish it so that you can reference it from your paper. To do that Chameleon supports integration with Zenodo, an open-access storage repository backed by CERN, for permanent artifact hosting. To share your artifact and store it on Zenodo, go to the “Share” page for the artifact. On the right-hand side you’ll see a list of all versions you’ve saved. Pick the version you want to publish to Zenodo and check “Request DOI”, then click “Save.”

Important

Once published, Zenodo artifacts cannot be deleted and are additionally publicly available. Your artifact will appear in Trovi in the “Public” section, and any Chameleon user can access it, as can anybody on the Internet via Zenodo’s own listing.

If you wish to make your artifact public but don’t to publish it, use the “Publish without DOI” option. With this option it is possible to make the artifact private later on if you wish; this is not possible when publishing to Zenodo.

This also creates a DOI, which you can easily include in your paper. The artifacts shared on Zenodo also appear on Trovi.

Importing an artifact

Instead of creating an artifact inside Jupyterhub, you can package an existing Git repository into an artifact. When a user launches the artifact, the contents of the repository will be added to a Jupyter notebook.

To create an artifact, click “Import Artifact” on the sidebar of Trovi. You are first asked for the artifact’s metadata. At the bottom of the form, there is a button for “Import from Git.” After clicking this, you will need to enter a git remote URL, and choose which commit to tie the version to.

To update the artifact, you must create a new version. This ensures that a given version of your artifact always has the same contents.

Exporting via git

If you wish to move your code and notebooks outside of your Jupyter notebook, one option is to export it into a git repository.

1. Click the “+” button on the top left of your notebook, and choose “Terminal”.
2. Run the command cd work. If there is a specific directory you wish to export, you can cd again into it.
3. Follow the instructions to set up a repository per your git host. For GitHub see this document.
4. After the repository is setup, you should be able to commit and push with the git CLI.