We are setting up some JIT space for SlicerMorph usage. People will login with their own user accounts. I don’t want everyone to download and install Slicer and the extensions under their account, as everyone will be using the same thing.
What’s the proper way of adding extensions for everyone? I want to do this on the stable so that I can update the extension(s) for everyone.
I’m not a windows admin, but I would think you could just install everything you want in one user account and then share it read-only with all users on the system. The installation just needs to be someplace they can read. Then they would just need a shortcut to Slicer.exe and everything should just work.
I recently set up something similar for a network of linux machines, with the Slicer installation on a shared readonly file system. I thought about setting something up where they shared the same read-only installation and then installed extensions in their own accounts, but I decided that was overcomplicated and probably fragile so instead I decided that users who want their custom extensions can just do regular installs to their own account.
As an admin, I think I can point out the installation folder to something like C:\Slicer and have it install there. But what I wasn’t sure if restart the slicer (again as an admin), and try to install extensions for users, wouldn’t those go to c:\users\murat\appdata\local\Slicer, as opposed to c:\Slicer\Slicer.org\Extensions-XXXXX etc…The former path would be inaccessible to others, the latter will be accessible but readonly.
(I don’t have admin rights so I can’t try it yet).
Maybe you want to make a dedicated Slicer user account, but I believe if you give global read access (maybe read and execute) to the AppData\Local\Slicer folder it should work. The extensions are self-contained in the application folder. People can just copy that folder to their own space if they want to customize.
That is not allowed on company systems.
I am not sure if windows will allow read/execute permission inside a folder (Users\Murat) which is not readable for other users. Will try.
On a regular windows everything works fine if I install the Slicer directly on C:\
Extensions and python packages go in there.
Default permissions generated by Windows for the C:\Slicer folder includes modify for “Authenticated Users”, which means people logged on the system are allowed to make changes (even install/uninstall extensions, python packages).
If our company policies allows this, all should be good.