Administering Hue

Hue's User Admin application provides two levels of user privileges: superusers and users.

• Superusers — The first user who logs into Hue after its installation becomes the first superuser. Superusers have permissions to perform administrative functions such as:
  • Add and delete users
  • Add and delete groups
  • Assign permissions to groups
  • Change a user into a superuser
  • Import users and groups from an LDAP server

• Users — can change their name, email address and password. They can log in to Hue and run Hue applications, subject to the permissions provided to the Hue groups to which they belong.

The hue-server package includes service scripts to start and stop the Hue Server.

To start the Hue Server:

$ sudo service hue start

To restart the Hue Server:

$ sudo service hue restart

To stop the Hue Server:

$ sudo service hue stop

Hue currently requires that the machines within your cluster can connect to each other freely over TCP. The machines outside your cluster must be able to open TCP port 8888 on the Hue Server (or the configured Hue web HTTP port) to interact with the system.

Hue tracks anonymized pages and application versions to gather information about application usage levels. The data collected does not include any hostnames or IDs.

For Hue 2.5.0 and higher, you can restrict this data collection by setting the collect_usage property to false in the [desktop] section in the Hue configuration file, hue.ini.

[desktop]
...
# Help improve Hue with anonymous usage analytics. 
# Use Google Analytics to see how many times an application or specific section of an application is used, nothing more.  
## collect_usage=false

If you are using an earlier version of Hue, disable this data collection by navigating to Step 3 of Hue's Quick Start Wizard. Under Anonymous usage analytics, uncheck the Check to enable usage analytics checkbox.

A script called supervisor manages all Hue processes. The supervisor is a watchdog process; its only purpose is to spawn and monitor other processes. A standard Hue installation starts and monitors the runcpserver process.

• runcpserver – a web server that provides the core web functionality of Hue

If you have installed other applications into your Hue instance, you may see other daemons running under the supervisor as well.

You can see the supervised processes running in the output of ps -f -u hue.

Note that the supervisor automatically restarts these processes if they fail for any reason. If the processes fail repeatedly within a short time, the supervisor itself shuts down.

Hue logs are stored in /var/log/hue. In the Hue UI, select About Hue > Server Logs. You can also view these logs at http://myserver:port/logs.

Hue generates .log and .out files for each supervised process. The .log files write log information with log4j. The .out files write standard output (stdout) and standard error (stderr) streams.

The following Hue logs are available.