WFU HPC Team (deac-help@wfu.edu)
Primary Contact: Sean Anderson (anderss@wfu.edu)

Want to deliver more customized portals tailored for classes, departments, and research groups? Open OnDemand makes it easy using Profiles!

Host-based profiles enable you to serve specific content for different domains. For example, you could have bio254.school.edu, econ.school.edu, and feynmanlab.school.edu each with their own OOD dashboard, all on the same OOD instance!

In this example, will be creating a portal for a (sadly) fictional OOD101 class.

You will need to edit an OOD configuration file to enable the host-based profiles. This is done by adding the following option to the file:

host_based_profiles: true

The easiest place to add this option is in your main configuration file, which may be /etc/ood/config/ondemand.d/ondemand.yml. You can always create a new file in /etc/ood/config/ondemand.d/if desired.

Either way, restart your PUN for the change to take effect.

You will need to add the desired domains as aliases in the OOD portal configuration file, /etc/ood/config/ood_portal.yml. You need to add each alias to the server_aliases entry, like this:

# The server name used for name-based Virtual Host
# Example:
#     servername: 'www.example.com'
# Default: null (don't use name-based Virtual Host)
servername: login.school.edu

# The server aliases used for the name-based Virtual Host
# Example:
#     server_aliases:
#       - foo.example.com
server_aliases:
  - login.school.edu
  - bio254.school.edu
  - econ.school.edu
  - feynmanlab.school.edu
  - ood101.school.edu # <-- added our new alias here

If you use an OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication provider, you will probably need to add each alias to your "Authorized redirect URIs". Each provider will have a different interface; read their documentation carefully and add in each domain as needed.

WARNING: You will need to restart Apache which may be impactful for all logged in users:

sudo systemctl restart httpd
sudo systemctl restart htcacheclean

Lastly, restart your local PUN to finalize the changes.

The profile configuration consists of 3 files, located in the ood101 directory. A description of each file is included below.

This file defines the look and feel of the new portal. For host-based profiles, the profile must be named the same as the domain (ood101.school.edu). Determine what apps you want to include, the layout, name, etc. This is also where we include the HTML widget described in the next section.

profiles:
  ood101.school.edu: &ood101_profile
    dashboard_title: "OOD101 Class Portal"
    brand_bg_color: "#2c4b8c"
    dashboard_logo: "/public/logo-ood101.png"
    pinned_apps:
      - "sys/jupyter"
      - "sys/rstudio"
      - "sys/matlab"
    pinned_apps_group_by:
    dashboard_layout:
      rows:
        - columns:
          - width: 12
            widgets:
              - widget_ood101
        - columns:
          - width: 12
            widgets:
              - pinned_apps
    announcement_path:
      - "/etc/ood/config/announcements.d/ood101.md"

Check out the official OOD documentation for a complete list of all available options. Any value that you do not specify in the new profile, will default to the value in the main profile. For example, you set your main dashboard to have a black dashboard background (brand_bg_color); if you do not set a background color for your new profile, it will simply default to black.

The widget is an HTML file that is infinitely customizable. You can include text and links, ember videos, images, or even a Google Drive widget, and much more. We will keep it simple for this example and simply include some text and links. Read about custom widgets on the official OOD docs.

<h3>OOD101: Open OnDemand 101 (Fall 2025)</h3>

<p>
<b>HPC Center, Alumni Hall, W, 8:45 AM - 10:45 AM</b><br>
<b>Farrell Hall 105, T, 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM</b><br>
</p>

<ul>
<li><a href="https://hpc.wfu.edu" target="_blank">DEAC Cluster Homepage</a></li>
<li><a href="https://wfu.edu" target="_blank">Wake Forest University</a></li>
</ul> 

<p>Connecting computing power with powerful minds. Open OnDemand empowers students, researchers, and industry professionals with remote web access to supercomputers</p>

Lastly, you need to have a nice logo for your new portal. Your users will really appreciate a design that speaks to them! Below is the simple design used for this OOD101 class example.

BONUS: Imagemagick Fun

magick \
    "images/LOGO_HPC.png" \
       -background Transparent \
       -gravity East \
       -extent 3800x520 \
       -font Bodoni-72-Smallcaps-Book \
       -fill black \
       -pointsize 500 \
       -gravity NorthWest \
       -draw 'text 0,-75 "OOD101"' \
       -pointsize 350 \
       -gravity Center \
       -draw 'text 0,0 "@"' \
    "ood101/logo-ood101.png"

Now that you have your three files, you just need to put them on your OOD server. Following the same order as above:

• profile-ood101.yml -> /etc/ood/config/ondemand.d/profile-ood101.yml
• _widget_ood101.html.erb -> /etc/ood/config/apps/dashboard/views/widgets/_widget_ood101.html.erb
• logo-ood101.png -> /var/www/ood/public/logo-ood101.png

If you want to restrict access to the new portal and only allow a specific group of users, make sure you change the permissions on /etc/ood/config/ondemand.d/profile-ood101.yml to reflect that.

If you use Ansible for your configuration automation, you can create a simple task like this to copy the files to your server:

- name: 'openondemand profiles ood101'
  tags: 'openondemand_profiles_ood101'
  ansible.builtin.copy:
    src: "{{ item.src }}" 
    dest: "{{ item.dest }}"
    owner: root
    group: ood101
    directory_mode: "0750"
    mode: "preserve"
    force: true
  with_items:
    - src: "ood101/profile-ood101.yml"
      dest: "/etc/ood/config/ondemand.d/profile-ood101.yml"
    - src: "ood101/_widget_ood101.html.erb"
      dest: "/etc/ood/config/apps/dashboard/views/widgets/_widget_ood101.html.erb"
    - src: "ood101/logo-ood101.png"
      dest: "/var/www/ood/public/logo-ood101.png"