# How to create a system administrator depot?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-create-a-system-administrator-depot/14122>\
**Category:** General Usage\
**Tags:** package-manager\
**Created:** [August 27, 2018, 10:49am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-create-a-system-administrator-depot/14122 "2018-08-27T10:49:16Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 9\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![carstenbauer](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/carstenbauer/32/4981_2.png) [@carstenbauer](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/carstenbauer)\
**Post date:** [August 27, 2018, 10:49am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-create-a-system-administrator-depot/14122/1 "2018-08-27T10:49:16Z")

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This is from the [Pkg section of the Julia doc](https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/stdlib/Pkg/index.html) about the `DEPOT_PATH`:

> [@](#):
>
> The first entry is the “user depot” and should be writable by and owned by the current user. The user depot is where: registries are cloned, new package versions are installed, named environments are created and updated, package repos are cloned, newly compiled package image files are saved, log files are written, development packages are checked out by default, and global configuration data is saved. **Later entries in the depot path are treated as read-only and are appropriate for registries, packages, etc. installed and managed by system administrators.**

How do I set up such a system administrator depot?

Basically, what I want is to install a couple of packages system wide such that users don’t have to install them by themself.

(This is in the context of [How does one set up a centralized Julia installation?](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-does-one-set-up-a-centralized-julia-installation/13922))

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**Author:** ![carstenbauer](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/carstenbauer/32/4981_2.png) [@carstenbauer](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/carstenbauer)\
**Post date:** [August 27, 2018, 11:04am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-create-a-system-administrator-depot/14122/2 "2018-08-27T11:04:39Z")

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If possible, I would not just like to provide raw packages (stuff in `packages/`) but also the precompiled `.ji` files (stuff in `compiled/`).

A user, when he first starts julia, and types `add XY` will just get a reference to this system wide installation of XY in his Projects.toml. When he then tries to `using XY` it should just work (without another precompilation).

UPDATE: Ok, I probably don’t need the `compiled/` stuff to be system wide.

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**Author:** ![jlperla](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/jlperla/32/34332_2.png) [@jlperla](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/jlperla)\
**Post date:** [August 27, 2018, 1:51pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-create-a-system-administrator-depot/14122/3 "2018-08-27T13:51:39Z")

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> [@carstenbauer](#):
>
> UPDATE: Ok, I probably don’t want the `compiled/` stuff to be system wide.

Why not? The versions are segmented effectively? I am trying to get something similar built and curious on your thinking.

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**Author:** ![carstenbauer](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/carstenbauer/32/4981_2.png) [@carstenbauer](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/carstenbauer)\
**Post date:** [August 27, 2018, 2:06pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-create-a-system-administrator-depot/14122/4 "2018-08-27T14:06:40Z")

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@jlperla, I guess these files are rather small and there are few of them. Hence it’s not too importat to provide them in a centralized fashion. Also (guessing here) they might depend on the user’s system (image). Is that right?

(Concretely, I am looking at Conda, which ends up really big when no system python is used. Turns out that it’s the dependencies in `packages/Conda/deps` which (understandably) blow up.)

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**Author:** ![jlperla](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/jlperla/32/34332_2.png) [@jlperla](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/jlperla)\
**Post date:** [August 27, 2018, 2:10pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-create-a-system-administrator-depot/14122/5 "2018-08-27T14:10:42Z")

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I see. My main concern was caching the precompiled version to speed up the user experience.

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**Author:** ![johnh](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/johnh/32/3615_2.png) [@johnh](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/johnh)\
**Post date:** [August 27, 2018, 2:27pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-create-a-system-administrator-depot/14122/6 "2018-08-27T14:27:26Z")

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@carstenbauer Can you point to a specific problem here?  
One thing to note - the Modules environment is always useful in HPC clusters  
[https://modules.sourceforge.net](https://modules.sourceforge.net)  
I have simple Modules file which I use to work on either 0.6.4 and 1.0.0  
I think we should recognize that there will ALWAYS be a need for old/current/test versions of software packages on a shared system.  
When Julia 1.1 debuts it might be marvellous. But no-one will move wholesale to ti without being confident that 1.0.0 is available. Modules makes this easy.

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**Author:** ![carstenbauer](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/carstenbauer/32/4981_2.png) [@carstenbauer](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/carstenbauer)\
**Post date:** [August 27, 2018, 2:42pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-create-a-system-administrator-depot/14122/7 "2018-08-27T14:42:58Z")

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@johnh, I’m well aware of modules. In fact, I kind of recommended them two days ago ([Handling multiple versions of Julia - #2 by carstenbauer](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/handling-multiple-versions-of-julia/14035/2)) 🙂

I want to set up a centralized installation of julia in a multi-user institution network. So far (\<v0.7) I could basically only provide the binaries and every user has it’s own `.julia`. This leads to packages and so on being installed many many times.

WIth Pkg3 in Julia 1.0 it should be possible to also have some popular packages in a centralized `julia-depot` folder somewhere (see doc quote above).

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**Author:** ![johnh](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/johnh/32/3615_2.png) [@johnh](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/johnh)\
**Post date:** [August 28, 2018, 4:58pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-create-a-system-administrator-depot/14122/8 "2018-08-28T16:58:21Z")

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@carstenbauer Thankyou. That makes a great deal of sense. If you want to bounce some ideas off me, feel free.

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**Author:** ![CDLuminate](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/cdluminate/32/6787_2.png) [@CDLuminate](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/CDLuminate)\
**Post date:** [September 28, 2018, 6:19am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-create-a-system-administrator-depot/14122/9 "2018-09-28T06:19:43Z")

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Hi @carstenbauer, have you managed to setup such a depot?

I looked into how the `slug` is calculated and managed to install packages to the `/usr/share/julia` directory (the last path in DEPOT\_PATH). But the problem is I still have to manually add the metadata into `~/.julia/environments/v1.0/Manifests.toml` and `Project.toml` in order import it from julia. For example

```julia
⛬ >using Compat
⛬ >pathof(Compat)
"/usr/share/julia/packages/Compat/6B9KA/src/Compat.jl"

```

Do you have idea about this?