"Sharing" a workspace allows collaborators to actively work together in the same project workspace. You can see what sorts of changes your colleagues are implementing, troubleshoot a workspace efficiently as a team, and delegate work.

Important considerations when sharing

1. How to protect work from being overwritten 
Collaborators may end up making overwriting or changing someone else's work, or messing up your team's versioning organization
2. How are costs and billing covered? 
All work done, and costs incurred, in a shared workspace are covered under the original workspace Billing Project. This may be fine if all your collaborators are working in the same lab or wit the same grant. You may need to assign more restrictive roles (i.e. non-compute) for others when sharing. For an alternative to sharing with different implications for costs and billing, see this article on cloning a workspace . 

You can share from within your workspace or from the "Your Workspaces" page. Read on for step-by-step instructions.

Contents  

1. To share from within a workspace
2. To share from "Your Workspaces"
3. To share with a service account
   
   

1. To share from within a workspace 

Click on the three vertical dots on the top right of your workspace Dashboard (see screenshot below).  

In the popup menu, choose "Share"
 

1.1. Type in the Terra user account address of the person you want to share (step 1) with and hit "Return" or "Enter"
1.2. Choose the role you want to assign them
1.3. Click "Save." 

Your collaborator should see the workspace in "My Workspaces.

You can check to make sure your share was successful by clicking the three vertical dots again and selecting "Share".

2. To share from "Your Workspaces" 

To access the full list of Terra workspaces available to you, click on "View Workspaces" from the Terra homepage app.terra.bio:
  

All the workspaces you have access to will show up as cards (see screenshot below). Click on the three vertical dots at the lower right of the card of the workspace you want to share.

In the popup menu, choose "Share": 

2.1. Type in the Terra user account address of the person you want to share (step 1) with and hit "Return" or "Enter"
2.2. Choose the role you want to assign them
2.3. Click "Save" 

Your collaborator should see the workspace in "My Workspaces."

You can check to make sure your share was successful by clicking the three vertical dots again and selecting "Share".
 

3. To share with a service account   

In some cases, you may wish to share a workspace with a service account - a special type of account that manages permissions on your behalf, and authorizes access to cloud resources. For example, if you want to use a product like TensorFlow to apply machine learning algorithms to data in a workspace bucket, you can register a service account to manage authorization to that bucket.

To learn how to register a service account, click here.

NOTE: For security purposes, service accounts cannot be created in Firecloud-created Google Projects. The service account will need to be created in a different Google Project.

Running this script will register the new service account, and print out an email address for that account that will look something like this:

svc_account_name@project_name.iam.gserviceaccount.com

You can then share the workspace with the service account as described in options 2 and 3 of this article, entering that service account's email into the "user email" field. NOTE: You will also need to add the service account to the authorization domain if the workspace has one.

Click here for more details on Reader, Writer and Owner roles.