Configuring the job environment¶

HTCondor provides extremely detailed control over the environment in which a job is executed.

Default job environment¶

By default a job does not inherit any environment settings from the access point (the submit host), nor from the login profile of the job owner (user). The only environment variables assigned will be those set by HTCondor itself.

For full details on which environment variables are configured by default, see

https://htcondor.readthedocs.io/en/lts/users-manual/services-for-jobs.html#environment-variables.

The default job environment is extremely limited

The default job environment set by HTCondor is basically empty. In particular, 'standard' variables such as HOME, PATH, and USER are not included by default.

Setting environment variables¶

Extra enviromment variables should be set for jobs via the environment submit command.

For full details of the syntax of the environment command, please see

https://htcondor.readthedocs.io/en/lts/man-pages/condor_submit.html#:~:text=environment%20%3D

Setting environment variables for a job

environment = "KEY=VALUE KEY2='another value'"

This produces the following environment entries:

KEY=VALUE
KEY2=another value

Setting environment for discovering and reading IGWN data

For jobs that use GWDataFind to discover the locations of data, it may be sufficient to set:

environment = "GWDATAFIND_SERVER=datafind.igwn.org"

This may need to be combined with the relevant options for configuring credentials in order to actually read the data paths returned by GWDataFind.

Inheriting environment variables from the access point¶

Environment variables can be copied at the time of job submission using the getenv submit command.

For full details of the syntax of the getenv command, please see

https://htcondor.readthedocs.io/en/lts/man-pages/condor_submit.html#:~:text=getenv%20%3D

Copying environment variables to enable local data access

For jobs that wish to access local data files (rather than CVMFS-distributed data), on the LDAS systems at CIT, LHO, or CIT, it may be sufficient to set

getenv = DEFAULT_SEGMENT_SERVER, GWDATAFIND_SERVER, NDSSERVER

to copy these settings from the login environment provided by the local administrators.

The environment variables in the above example have the following uses:

Variable	Description
`DEFAULT_SEGMENT_SERVER`	the address of the default DQSegDB server
`GWDATAFIND_SERVER`	the address of the default GWDataFind server
`NDSSERVER`	the address (or `:`-separated list of addresses) of the default NDS2 server

Using getenv = true is unsupported

condor_submit supports specifying getenv = True as a proxy for getenv = *, effectively copying the submit environment to the job.

Use of this option is strongly discouraged in IGWN and may be forcibly disabled in the future. For details of the reasons for this discouragement, and plans to disable its use, please see

https://git.ligo.org/groups/computing/-/epics/30

Note: as of HTCondor 10.7, getenv = True is silently disabled (by default) for jobs that are submitted as part of a DAGMan workflow.