When we say "Personal HTCondor" we mean two things which are actually independent, but which normally go together

  1. A single node HTCondor pool
  2. A HTCondor pool in which all of the daemons and jobs run as a single user

These instructions show you how to set up HTCondor to be both of these things, but keep in mind that they are actually independent, and you can easily change the configuration to have a multi-node pool running as a single user, or a single-node pool where the daemons run as root (and jobs run unprivileged).

These instructions are for Linux, Unix and OSX. Instructions for Windows

Get HTCondor binaries

Downloading the tarball/zip release

Or build HTCondor and tar/zip the release_dir directory from the build 

# assuming that you build HTCondor V8_4_0-branch in /scratch/build/condor
cd /scratch/build/condor/release_dir
tar czf ../condor-8.4.0-x86_64_RedHat6-unstripped.tar.gz .

For Personal HTCondor we use the tarball/zip release because this lets you control where the binaries will be installed, and will allow you have more than a single version of HTCondor running at once.

Setting up your Personal HTCondor

The remainder of this guide will assume that you downloaded or built the condor-8.4.0-x86_64_RedHat6-unstripped.tar.gz tarball. If you are working with a different tarball, adjust the commands accordingly.

Unpack the HTCondor binaries (setting up "RELEASE_DIR")

We refer to the place where the HTCondor binaries live as RELEASE_DIR, you can unpack the tarball to create this directory using the following commands. 

cd /scratch
tar xf <path-to-tarball>/condor-8.2.10-x86_64_RedHat6-unstripped.tar.gz
# optionally rename the directory to something simpler
mv condor-8.4.0-x86_64_RedHat6-unstripped condor84

The directory /scratch/condor84 will now contain the HTCondor binaries, it will contain subdirectores bin, sbin, libexec, etc and several others. We call this directory RELEASE_DIR.

Create configuration (setting up "LOCAL_DIR")

HTCondor needs configuration files, and at least 3 runtime directories: log, spool and execute. The condor_install script will create all of these as children of a directory we call LOCAL_DIR. LOCAL_DIR can be the same directory as RELEASE_DIR, or it can be different. In this example we will make it different. 

mkdir /scratch/local/condor84
/scratch/condor84/condor_install --local-dir=/scratch/local/condor84 --make-personal-condor
# optional, copy the script that sets up the environment to local_dir
cp /scratch/condor84/condor.sh /scratch/local/condor84

The directory /scratch/local/condor84 will now contain directories log, spool, and execute. It will also have a condor_config.local file ready for you to begin customizing the configuration.

The condor.sh script will contain commands to setup the environment so that you can use the HTCondor you have just created. It puts the HTCondor binaries into your path, and sets the CONDOR_CONFIG variable. If you use the sh or bash shell, you can use it like this 

source /scratch/condor84/condor.sh

Run your Personal HTCondor

First, make sure that you will run the correct HTCondor. The which command can be used to find out if you will run the correct condor_master: 

> source /scratch/condor84/condor.sh
> which condor_master
/scratch/condor84/sbin/condor_master

Before we start Condor we need to make a few changes to the configuration. Open /scratch/condor84/etc/condor_config in your editor and append the following lines to it. (If NETWORK_INTERFACE is already set to 127.0.0.1 then you don't need to do this) 

add to end of condor_config
CONDOR_HOST = 127.0.0.1
NETWORK_INTERFACE = 127.0.0.1

Then run condor_master: 

condor_master
Wait a second, and make sure that everything is running: 
ps -x | grep condor
After running this command you should see the following daemons running:

Running a Simple Job

To start a job we must first create a submit file, use your editor to create a file sleep.sub, it should have the following statements 
sleep.sub
# The executable variable specifies the program to be run. In this case we will call the "sleep" function
executable = /bin/sleep
# Use the following variable to pass arguments to the executable
arguments = 10
# Use the following to specify how many of this job to queue and run
queue 2
After saving your changes, it's now time to submit the submit file you just created 
condor_submit sleep.sub
To check the status of your jobs use: 
condor_q

Closing Condor

If all is well with your personal HTCondor and all jobs have completed successfully, you can kill it with: 

condor_off -master

Remember you must use /scratch/condor84/condor.sh or some other method to set the PATH, CONDOR_CONFIG and other environment variables before you start HTCondor or use any of the tools.

A more complicated recipe that doesn't use condor_install