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Hutch Agent

🚧 Under Construction

This section is a work in progress. It may be incomplete and is subject to change.

The Hutch Agent is a .NET application written in C#. It is responsible for receiving 5-Safes RO-Crates with an approved workflow and triggering the execution of that workflow. It then awaits the results of the execution and packages them to be sent back to the TRE Controller.

Installation to a remote Virtual Machine​

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Currently, we only support deploying to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. The following instructions tell you how to do this using Ansible.

Installing Ansible​

On your local machine, you will need to install Ansible. Then you will need to download the Ansible playbooks for installing HutchAgent, the workflow executor (WfExS) and all the side dependencies for the Hutch environment. Your remote machine must be accessible via ssh by your local machine. You must also have a user on the remote machine with sudo privileges.

Providing HutchAgent configuration for Ansible​

In the directory where you've downloaded and unpacked the Ansible playbooks, find the file hutch-agent.service in playbooks/files. Open this file in a text editor of your choice and set the configuration variables to suit your environment. Guidance on the use of the variables can be found here.

Once the configuration is finished, you can deploy HutchAgent to your VM.

Running Ansible​

Open the file called inventory.ini, at the top directory where you downloaded the Ansible playbooks, and add either the IP address of the VM to which you are deploying or the hostname of the VM.

Open a terminal window in the top directory where you downloaded the Ansible playbooks and use the following command:

ansible-playbook -i inventory.ini -u <remote username> -K playbook.yml
About the command
  • ansible-playbook: the command that will run an Ansible playbook.
  • -i inventory.ini: -i is the flag used when specifying an inventory file - a file with a list of IP addresses or hostnames to execute the playbook against. inventory.ini is the file with the IPs/hostnames and it is already in the playbook directory's root.
  • -u <remote user>: -u is the flag to specify the username on the remote machine that will execute the playbook. Replace <remote user> with a username on the remote machine, e.g. alice.
  • -K: this will cause ansible-playbook to prompt you for the sudo password on the remote machine.
  • playbook.yml: the name of the main playbook in the directory.