Hi Keith,

Galaxy has been able to load tools after installation for quite some time,
however that did not work for production setups that are using multiple
job handler threads.

We did indeed refine the tool loading to work for production servers starting with release 16.10
(it's mentioned in the release notes https://docs.galaxyproject.org/en/master/releases/16.10_announce.html).
Aspects of this have been refined up to release 17.05, which should be the most reliable concerning this feature.

No special options need to be set to use this, it should hopefully just work.
Technically we watch the various shed_tool_conf.xml / tool_conf.xml files as well as the individual tool wrappers for changes
and trigger a reload, which we speed up by caching the tool definitions.
One thing we can't do at the moment is detect if a macro file that is included in a tool has changes,
so in this case you'd still need to restart the galaxy instance unfortunately.

There is another option (watch_tools, see https://github.com/galaxyproject/galaxy/blob/release_17.05/config/galaxy.ini.sample#L257)
 in the galaxy.ini that allows you to watch a directory of tools 
(i.e no installation from the toolshed or modification of a tool_conf,xml file necessary) that you can activate.
If you want to use this feature you need to indicate in your tool_conf.xml file which directory you would like to monitor.
The syntax is like this:

<tool_dir dir="<directory to monitor>" recursive="true"/>

(The recursive="true" is not necessary if you want to monitor a flat directory).

Best,
Marius


On 20 August 2017 at 04:13, Keith Suderman <suderman@cs.vassar.edu> wrote:
I thought I had read that newer versions of Galaxy were able to watch the tools directory and update the tools menu when any tool wrappers were added, deleted, or modified; basically the "Admin -> Reload a tool's configuration" without the administrator actually having to do anything.  However, my Google searches are not turning up anything?  Am I over-remembering something I had read or are my Google skills failing me?

This is for an upcoming course that will involve students developing tools and pipelines. We want the teaching assistants to be able to update their master Galaxy instance with new tools without a lot of button clicks or a server restart.

Thanks,
Keith

----------------------
Keith Suderman
Research Associate
Department of Computer Science
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie NY





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