Background

We often receive the following question from customers:

I have software with limited licenses that I only want certain users to have access to. How do I make sure only those users can load the modules for that software?

This article explains how to accomplish this.

Steps

1. Place the module or modules in question in a different directory from the other modules.

• For example, you can move the information for a module to /cm/shared/secret.

2. Modify the /etc/profile.d/modules.sh script to have logic that looks for a specific user ID, and if the ID matches, it appends the “secret” directory to the MODULEPATH_TMP variable. 

• In this example /cm/shared/secret was used, and we are searching for the user cmtest.
  • You can specify any path that is generally available to users.
  • You can specify any user string.
• The beginning of that script has an additional if statement nested in the if statement that matches non-root users:

  if [ "$ENABLE_LMOD" == "0" ];then 
    if [ `id -u` -ne 0 ]; then 
      MODULEPATH_TMP=/cm/local/modulefiles:/cm/shared/modulefiles 
      PATH_TMP=/sbin:/usr/sbin:/cm/local/apps/environment-modules/4.0.0/bin 
      if [ $USER == 'cmtest' ] ; then 
        MODULEPATH_TMP=$MODULEPATH_TMP:/cm/shared/secret 
      fi 
    else 
  ... 

3. When logging in as the cmtest user, we can see the module in /cm/shared/secret when running module avail.

4. If you want those modules loaded by default for the user, you can modify their .bashrc, loading the module when they log in.