Bug 2098167

Summary: Missing overrides information in cockpit/web console documentation
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Reporter: Steve Barcomb <sbarcomb>
Component: DocumentationAssignee: Mayur Patil <maypatil>
Documentation sub component: default QA Contact:
Status: NEW --- Docs Contact: Mayur Patil <maypatil>
Severity: medium    
Priority: high CC: kwalker, lmanasko, maypatil, mpitt, rhel-docs, tcapek
Version: 8.7Keywords: Documentation, Triaged
Target Milestone: rc   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Enhancement
Doc Text:
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Last Closed: Type: Bug
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Documentation: --- CRM:
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Steve Barcomb 2022-06-17 13:24:22 UTC 
A customer has recently asked about disabling all widgets in the cockpit/web console except for the terminal application.  This lead to https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/packages.html#package-manifest-override which details how to use overrides.

A correction to the upstream documentation though.  The above links says to put this information into /etc/cockpit, but in testing this looks to be required in /usr/share/cockpit in each directory within that a customer wishes to disable.

Additionally, the version of cockpit that I think is coming in RHEL8.7 cockpit-271 seems to allow disablement on a per user basis with those overrides files being placed in ~/.config/cockpit/<system> which does not yet seems to be documented upstream.
Comment 5 Martin Pitt 2022-11-07 06:32:14 UTC 
> A correction to the upstream documentation though.  The above links says to put this information into /etc/cockpit, but in testing this looks to be required in /usr/share/cockpit in each directory within that a customer wishes to disable.

/usr/share/cockpit/$page/override.json was indeed the old location, before cockpit 265 [1]. That is refered to with "A file called override.json may be placed next to the manifest". But this is awkward, as /usr/share/ is package manager territory, and users/admins really should not write there. It's not even possible with OSTree systems like RHEL Edge or Fedora CoreOS. So possibly you tested on RHEL 8.6 or earlier? RHEL 8.7 supports this new path.


> Additionally, the version of cockpit that I think is coming in RHEL8.7 cockpit-271 seems to allow disablement on a per user basis with those overrides files being placed in ~/.config/cockpit/<system> which does not yet seems to be documented upstream.

If you mean that ~/.config/cockpit/systemd/override.json could override /usr/share/cockpit/systemd/manifest.json, then no, that's not supported (and not planned). See [2]. We only support ~/.config/cockpit/systemd.override.json (i.e. flat hierarchy in the cockpit/ directory, not a tree), and that is documented.



[1] https://cockpit-project.org/blog/cockpit-265.html
[2] https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/commit/f0f497655b62b4efcef3ad0b31bb6d9137d184b5#diff-a5bc1c4fb29285eb87cb819cca5fb3183d556933bf927a0224ee12bbc7c2c634R409