Ability to ignore write access requirement to plugins dir

[martinfthomsen]

Issue no. 3416

Background

When running Nextflow v 22.10.0, the program fails if it does not have write access to the plugins directory.

N E X T F L O W  ~  version 22.10.0
Unable to create plugins dir: /path/to/nextflow/22.10.0/plugins

When running on an offline cluster, there is no access to download anything at runtime, all resources are local and preinstalled. Thus there is no need to download new plugins.
Also, when running multi tenant (having many different users on the system) you want to protect the core from user meddling, so you do not want to provide write access to the plugins directory. It should be read only.

Currently our local workaround is to tell the users create a new plugins directory, and setting NXF_PLUGINS_DIR.
export NXF_PLUGINS_DIR=/path/to/some/private/dir

I tried looking at the source code for Nextflow, but I could not identify where the observed check happens.

New feature

I have requested an option to turn off plugins write access check, so that the pipeline does not fail?

Do anyone know of an alternative solution or have a better suggestion?

Kind regards.