Tarring projects

Tarring projects is the technique of compacting all information in a project in a single file (called tarball). This file can be then copied to a different machine network. to be executed there.

There are two main scenarios where you may want to tar projects

• You are using a local workstation to design projects, as the memory of the workstation gives you an immediate feedback (when, for instance, designing masks, looking at particles, etc). When all the setup work is done, the projects is to be ran in different remote machine .
• You ran a project in a remote machine where graphical operations are slow, and want to examine the results on your more powerful local machine.
• You are collaborating with other researchers. They ran a project and sent it to you so that you can examine the results.

Tarring can also be used to store into a single file all the re

Do not use the system tar command to create a tarred version of a project!!

Differences with the system command tar

The Dynamo command dvtar is not an exact equivalent of the system tar command. In a Dynamoproject, you may have linked tables,templates, and masks which are in the path of your machine, but not in the project folder. In your system, the project will look for these elements in the local file structure.

dvtar will make copies of all the linked files into the project folder, and will direct the project to look for the elements (tables, templates, etc....) in their location relative to the project folder. This way you can move the folder to another location.

Command line syntax

The full syntax description can be found here dthelp.

dvtar myProject will create a tarball myProject.tar which includes all linked files, but not the data.

dvtar myProject -data 1

to pass also the data

Transferring data

It is possible to transfer the data inside the tarball. This is only useful when the size of the data set is rather small, probably for demonstration purposes. In real projects, you don't want to transfer around files of several Gb continuously. It is often the case that you have your data in a local location, and a copy of it in a remote location. In such cases, you will want to relink the data in the project untarred in the target machine.

This can be easily done with the dvput command: dvput myProject -data dataInRemoteSystem where nameOfDataInRemote is the name of the data folder in the remote machine.