Grouper Training - Administration - Lesson: GSH

Getting started

Connect to your VM

If you mistype one or more lines in GSH, type :c to clear all the lines since the last executed command.

To exit GSH, type :q

Reference Links

Grouper wiki command reference for GSH
- https://spaces.internet2.edu/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=14517859
Groovy syntax: https://groovy-lang.org/documentation.html
- For a quick language intro, see the Style guide page
- Also useful is The Groovy Development Kit page
Grouper API Javadoc: https://software.internet2.edu/grouper/doc/
- 2.6.x (active release branch) -> Grouper API -> Project Reports -> Javadoc
3rd Party site Baeldung - Groovy blog posts: https://www.baeldung.com/tag/groovy/
3rd Party site MrHaki - Groovy blog posts: https://blog.mrhaki.com/

Getting started

Look at the script of the gte-gsh command in your home directory.

cat ~/gte-gsh

On the last line, you can see it's logging into your container and running the gsh.sh command

With a GTE container started and running, GSH can initiated by running:

gte-gsh

After some startup information, wait until the groovy:000> prompt.

Example commands

Find a subject and save to a variable

Save the banderson subject into a variable:

def subj = SubjectFinder.findByIdentifier("banderson", true)

Note we could have also used Subject subj = ... to enforce object type checking, but it's optional.

We can call various method on this variable. Since it is a Subject, we can get the name:

println subj.name

Exploring interactive terminal

Try pressing the up arrow and down arrow. You should see the history of previous commands that you ran.
If the interpreter detects a multi-line command it will wait until you finish it. You can abort this with :c

Enter this command:

def myVar = (
    1 + 3

Notice the number in groovy:000 incremented on each row, while waiting for the ending parenthesis. If we enter ), the command will finish, and the line will go be to 000. If we instead want to cancel the command due to a mistake, enter :c. Try both methods to finish the above command and get back to the start of a new command.

3 ) Auto-completion

Enter the command subj. and hit the tab key. Notice that the interpreter tells you what methods are publicly available. The ones with parentheses may take variables, and it's hard to know what to use without documentation. But you can call the ones with no parentheses. With the cursor still at the subj, try some of these, like subj.description or subj.sourceId.

Example when an error occurs

Run the following command:

def admins = GroupFinder.findByName("etc:sysadmin", true)

GSH displays a friendly version of the problem (highlighted in red, depending on your console) and we can quickly see that we just put in the wrong group name. The additional stack information is helpful if you ever need to report a problem out to Grouper's bug reporting system.

Finding a group, printing its members

Knowing the correct name of the group, run the following command:

def admins = GroupFinder.findByName("etc:sysadmingroup", true)

This stores a Group object into another variable.

We can fetch the members of this group, and loop through each one and print them on a single line. Note we have the group variable, so we don't need to find the group again.

for (Member member: admins.getMembers()) {
    println "Member: ${member}"
}