rgbkrk / jupyterhub

Multi-user server for Jupyter notebooks

JupyterHub: A multi-user server for Jupyter notebooks

This repo hosts the development of a multi-user server to manage and proxy multiple instances of the single-user IPython Jupyter notebook server.

Three actors:

• multi-user Hub (tornado process)
• configurable http proxy (node-http-proxy)
• multiple single-user IPython notebook servers (Python/IPython/tornado)

Basic principles:

• Hub spawns proxy
• Proxy forwards ~all requests to hub by default
• Hub handles login, and spawns single-user servers on demand
• Hub configures proxy to forward url prefixes to single-user servers

Dependencies

First install the configurable HTTP proxy package (-g for global install):

npm install [-g] jupyter/configurable-http-proxy

Next install bower to fetch the JavaScript dependencies and less to compile CSS:

npm install -g bower less

Note on debian/ubuntu machines, you may need to install the nodejs-legacy package to get node executables to work:

sudo apt-get install nodejs-legacy

This installs the traditional node executable, in addition to debian's renamed nodejs executable, with which the apt-get installed npm doesn't actually work.

Installation

Then you can install the Python package by doing:

pip install .

This will fetch Javascript dependencies and compile CSS, and install these files to sys.prefix/share/jupyter.

Development install

For a development install:

pip install -e .

In which case you may need to manually update javascript and css after some updates, with:

python setup.py bower # fetch updated js (changes rarely)
python setup.py css   # recompile CSS from LESS sources

Running the server

To start the server, run the command:

jupyterhub

and then visit http://localhost:8000, and sign in with your unix credentials.

If you want multiple users to be able to sign into the server, you will need to run the jupyterhub command as a privileged user, such as root.