Hi,

We are setting up a new cluster at our university, and I stumbled upon the following problem: our nodes used for remote visualization don't have access to the internet. Therefore, users running an interactive graphical session won't be able to install bundles by themselves, which was the case in our old cluster.

One workaround is to start ChimeraX either without GUI or with X forwarding over SSH on one of the normal login nodes (no high-end visualization capability) just for the purpose of downloading and installing bundles from the toolshed. This is however inconvenient to most users. Another approach is to install using the 'toolshed' command with a pre-downloaded wheel, but also not ideal.

My thought would be to preinstall the most common plugins we use (like ArtiaX and ISOLDE) into a shared location, and ChimeraX would then find the bundles installed there upon startup.

Therefore, my question is: is any other path other than the user's home folder supported for installing bundles? If yes, what is the order of search paths?

Alternatively, is there some environment variable or other setting that I can use to tell ChimeraX where to find installed bundles?

Thanks in advance,