How To Use the Preview Environment

What is the Globus preview environment?

Globus provides a Preview environment for previewing upcoming changes to Globus services. This allows developers and users to test their applications with the changes before the changes are released for mainstream use. Most of the time, the services in the Preview environment are the same as the normal system. When significant changes are being readied for release, we deploy them in the Preview environment for testing and announce it on the Globus User Discussion email list.

The Preview environment is isolated and completely separate from the main Globus service. User accounts, groups, endpoint registrations, and application registrations are not shared between the normal system and the Preview system. You will need to create and maintain separate accounts, groups, endpoint registrations, and application registrations for the Preview environment.

We do not make any durability guarantees on data, accounts, groups, endpoint registrations, and application registrations for the Preview environment. This environment is meant for testing only.

Important
The Preview environment is an evaluation environment and may not be used with sensitive data. Information you enter into the Preview environment, such as display names, transfer labels, group names, etc., must not contain sensitive data. Any data you manage in the Preview environment, including file contents, filenames, and directory paths, also must not contain sensitive data.

The Preview environment is available at https://app.preview.globus.org. Other service information is listed below.

Web             app.preview.globus.org
Auth            auth.preview.globus.org
Transfer API    transfer.api.preview.globus.org
Globus ID       globusid.preview.globus.org
Groups API      groups.api.preview.globus.org

Preview TCP ports

Since services will be connecting to your endpoint from the Preview environment, some additional ports must be open. (These are in addition to the normal Globus Connect Server firewall requirements.)

Port 2811 inbound from 107.20.144.193

  • Used for GridFTP control channel traffic.

Port 7512 inbound from 107.20.144.193

  • Used for MyProxy traffic.

  • This is only needed if your server is using a MyProxy service.

Using the Globus CLI

To use the Globus CLI with the Preview environment, set the GLOBUS_SDK_ENVIRONMENT environment variable to the value "preview". This tells the CLI to make API calls to the Preview environment’s services.

You will need to login again when you set this environment variable, but because the CLI manages tokens separately for each environment, you can unset the GLOBUS_SDK_ENVIRONMENT variable or use a separate terminal to go back to using the main environment without having to login again.

If you logout of one environment, it will not log you out of the other environment automatically, so be sure to logout of both environments when you are done.

For example, if you are using a bash shell, you can login to the preview environment with the following commands.

$ export GLOBUS_SDK_ENVIRONMENT=preview
$ globus login

You can logout of both environments using the following commands.

$ globus logout
$ unset GLOBUS_SDK_ENVIRONMENT
$ globus logout