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Make user's home direcotry persistent using hostPath

Prerequisites

  • a Kuberenetes cluster with abcdesktop installed

Define hostPath folder and update od.config

On your node, create a folder that will be the mount point for your user's home directories. For example mnt/abcdesktop_volumes/.
Then you have to edit your od.config file. First set desktop.homedirectorytype to 'hostPath' and then add a desktop.hostPathRoot whose value will be the path to the mount point you previously created.

desktop.homedirectorytype: 'hostPath'

#
# desktop.hostPathRoot set the hostPath root directory
# desktop.hostPathRoot is read only if desktop.homedirectorytype: 'hostPath'
desktop.hostPathRoot: '/mnt/abcdesktop_volumes'

Kubernetes will automatically create a folder for each of your users if it does not already exists.

Finally, update the configmap and restart pyos by running the commands below 

kubectl create -n abcdesktop configmap abcdesktop-config --from-file=od.config -o yaml --dry-run=client | kubectl replace -n abcdesktop -f -
kubectl rollout restart deploy pyos-od -n abcdesktop

Check if user's homedir is persistent

You can now connect to your abcdesktop and login as a user.

Once connected you can run the following command to see if the user's homedir system exists

kubectl describe pod <YOUR-POD-NAME> -n abcdesktop

You should see someting like this in the volumes section

Volumes:
  home:
    Type:          HostPath (bare host directory volume)
    Path:          /mnt/abcdesktop_volumes/fry
    HostPathType:  DirectoryOrCreate

You can also check on your host if a directory has been created

ls -la /mnt/abcdesktop_volumes/
total 20
drwxr-xr-x  5 root root  4096 Apr  7 16:44 .
drwxr-xr-x 14 root root  4096 Apr  7 11:39 ..
drwxr-x--- 15 2042 12042 4096 Apr  8 11:21 fry

By the way, the id of that folder's owner should be your user's id.

Now you can create a file in the user's homedir

create file on user homedir

You can check if the file is present on your host.

ls -la /mnt/abcdesktop_volumes/fry
drwxr-x--- 2 2042 12042 4096 Mar 17 15:09 Desktop
drwxr-x--- 2 2042 12042 4096 Mar 17 15:09 Documents
drwxr-x--- 2 2042 12042 4096 Mar 17 15:09 Downloads
drwxr-x--- 2 2042 12042 4096 Mar 17 15:09 Music
drwxr-x--- 2 2042 12042 4096 Mar 17 15:09 Pictures
drwxr-x--- 2 2042 12042 4096 Mar 17 15:09 Public
drwxr-x--- 2 2042 12042 4096 Mar 17 15:09 Templates
-rw-r----- 1 2042 12042    0 Mar 18 09:11 toto.txt
drwxr-x--- 2 2042 12042 4096 Mar 17 15:09 Videos

Then perform a logoff to destroy your pod and recreates it, once reconnected on a new pod with the same user, check if the file you previously created is still there, it should appear.

check peristent user homedir

Great ! Now you can configure home directory persistency using hostPath.