PEP software migration

The PEP code base has been restructured to facilitate the continued development, maintenance, and support of the PEP software. The rollout of the new structure started in April of 2022 and makes some changes to PEP's deployment mechanism. As a result, existing users will need to perform some one-time manual actions to migrate to the new situation.

We've tried to make things as simple and as backward compatible as possible, and we hope that the instructions on this page will provide sufficient guidance for users to migrate their setup to the new approach. But if things are unclear or don't work as expected, please don't hesitate to contact your PEP support contact so that we can improve the instructions. The support team can also be contacted to provide (e-mail) assistance translating the generic instructions to your specific situation.

At this point, all PEP environments have been migrated to the new situation. Older PEP client software versions can no longer connect to the environments. Instead new versions should be used, which are available at the locations detailed below.

Windows users

The PEP client software for Windows is distributed as an (MSI) installer package. Once the software (for a particular environment) has been installed, users that run the pepAssessor GUI application are prompted to upgrade their software if/when a new version becomes available. The upgrade can then be installed with minimal user intervention.

The transition from the old to the new structure has proven to be too cumbersome to automate. Consequently, Windows users will need to install the new version manually, as follows:

Log on to your machine using an account with administrative privileges.
Use the Windows "Apps & features" or "Programs and Features" to uninstall any old software versions for the same environment. For example, if you're installing a new production version for the PPP environment, you'd need to uninstall PEP (POM) 1.0.xxxxx if it's listed.
Download the new installer from our server. The table below lists the download locations for the various environments.
Run the installer and complete the wizard to put the software on your computer. Depending on settings and policies, you may need to
confirm to Microsoft Defender SmartScreen that you really want to execute the downloaded installer: click the More info link, then click the Run anyway button.
confirm that you want to allow this app from an unknown publisher to make changes to your computer.
when first running the new software (e.g. pepAssessor or pepLogon), if you're notified that Windows Defender Firewall has blocked some features of this app, click the Allow access button to let your software communicate with the PEP servers.

Once the new software is running properly, the upgrade mechanism will once again keep the software up to date. The new version will be listed under "Apps & features" and/or "Programs and Features" as PEP (your flavor) 1.1.xxxxx. The PEP (your flavor) 1.0.xxxxx version cannot be used anymore and should have been uninstalled in step 2.

Since most systems will only have a single PEP flavor installed, the Start Menu will usually only provide a single PEP (some flavor) folder and users should (obviously) use that one. For users that install multiple flavors, the Start Menu folder names will still indicate the environment that the software connects to, but the folder names will be different from before.

The Windows installer packages for the various environments can be downloaded from the following locations:

Project	Acceptance	Production
PPP/POM	download	download
Healthy Brain	download	download
Play	download	none

Docker image (*nix) users

PEP client software for Linux is distributed as Docker containers. While these containers (obviously) provide PEP binaries such as pepcli, previous versions did not include the configuration needed to connect to (specific) project environments. Users were instead required to provide such configuration themselves, e.g. starting containers with a --volume (or the -v equivalent) switch to expose the configuration files to the container.

The new deployment mechanism introduces client Docker images that include configuration files to connect to a specific PEP environment. Users should switch to using the new client images instead of other PEP images they may be using. To run Docker containers based on the new images, please perform the following steps. Note that pepcli invocations should keep working after each individual step.

Change your docker run and/or docker exec command lines to use the new image registry location instead of the one you've been using. The table below lists the image tags to use for the various PEP environments. The image registry is publicly accessible, so you won't need to docker login to pull the client images.
Update your pepcli command lines so that the executable uses the configuration in the /config directory included in the image, e.g. specify the --client-working-directory /config switch, or cd /config before invoking pepcli.
Stop providing external configuration files (using --volume or -v switches) to the Docker container. Note that users must (still) provide
any user specific data: e.g. if you used to pass an --oauth-token to pepcli, you'll still need to provide it. And if you point the --oauth-token switch to a (JSON) file, you'll still need to run Docker with a --volume switch to make the file available to the container.
a writable Docker volume (referring to a host directory) when using pepcli to produce files that you want to keep. E.g. when invoking pepcli pull, you might provide the Docker container with a --volume /home/$(whoami)/pep-data:/output, and pass an --output-directory /output/latest switch to pepcli pull. Use a similar approach when redirecting output to file.

If you're connecting to different environments, you'll need to use different client images to do so. The client images for the various environments are published at the following locations:

Project	Acceptance	Production
PPP/POM	`gitlabregistry.pep.cs.ru.nl/pep-public/core/ppp-acc:latest`	`gitlabregistry.pep.cs.ru.nl/pep-public/core/ppp-prod:latest`
Healthy Brain	`gitlabregistry.pep.cs.ru.nl/pep-public/core/hb-acc:latest`	`gitlabregistry.pep.cs.ru.nl/pep-public/core/hb-prod:latest`
Play	`gitlabregistry.pep.cs.ru.nl/pep-public/core/play-acc:latest`	none