[OOZIE-1871] Investigate if we can propagate the delegation token to the action conf from the Oozie server instead of action

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: trunk
• Component/s: security
• Assignee: Robert Kanter
• Reporter: Robert Kanter
• Created: 09/Jun/14 22:30
• Updated: 09/Jun/14 23:33

Description

Currently, Oozie prepares a configuration for the action to use when launching MR jobs. Oozie also provides an environment variable with the location of the tokens file. It is up to the action's Main to:

1. Load the Configuration
2. Get the location of the Token file
3. Propagate the token file to the loaded Configuration
4. Pass the Configuration to the CLI/MR Job/etc

This isn't too much of a problem for most actions because we handle this for the user, but for the Java action, it's 4 not-obvious steps. We should investigate if we can make this one step by having the Configuration prepared by the Oozie server already have the token file propagated to it; then actions would have 2 steps:

1. Load the Configuration
2. Pass the Configuration to the CLI/MR Job/etc
   And the tokens would be handled automatically.

We'd still have to provide the environment variable for backwards compatibility and flexibility reasons though.