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JupyterHub

With JupyterHub you can create a multi-user Hub which spawns, manages, and proxies multiple instances of the single-user Jupyter notebook server.

Project Jupyter created JupyterHub to support many users. The Hub can offer notebook servers to a class of students, a corporate data science workgroup, a scientific research project, or a high performance computing group.

Technical overview

Three main actors make up JupyterHub:

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

Basic principles for operation are:

• Hub spawns a 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 the single-user notebook servers.

JupyterHub also provides a REST API for administration of the Hub and its users.

Installation

Check prerequisites

A Linux/Unix based system with the following:

• Python 3.4 or greater

• nodejs/npm Install a recent version of nodejs/npm For example, install it on Linux (Debian/Ubuntu) using:

  sudo apt-get install npm nodejs-legacy
  

  The nodejs-legacy package installs the node executable and is currently required for npm to work on Debian/Ubuntu.

• TLS certificate and key for HTTPS communication

• Domain name

Install packages

JupyterHub can be installed with pip, and the proxy with npm:

npm install -g configurable-http-proxy
pip3 install jupyterhub    

If you plan to run notebook servers locally, you will need to install the Jupyter notebook package:

pip3 install --upgrade notebook

Run the Hub server

To start the Hub server, run the command:

jupyterhub

Visit https://localhost:8000 in your browser, and sign in with your unix PAM credentials.

Note: To allow multiple users to sign into the server, you will need to run the jupyterhub command as a privileged user, such as root. The wiki describes how to run the server as a less privileged user, which requires more configuration of the system.

Configuration

The Getting Started section of the documentation explains the common steps in setting up JupyterHub.

The JupyterHub tutorial provides an in-depth video and sample configurations of JupyterHub.

Create a configuration file

To generate a default config file with settings and descriptions:

jupyterhub --generate-config

Start the Hub

To start the Hub on a specific url and port 10.0.1.2:443 with https:

jupyterhub --ip 10.0.1.2 --port 443 --ssl-key my_ssl.key --ssl-cert my_ssl.cert

Authenticators

Authenticator	Description
PAMAuthenticator	Default, built-in authenticator
OAuthenticator	OAuth + JupyterHub Authenticator = OAuthenticator
ldapauthenticator	Simple LDAP Authenticator Plugin for JupyterHub
kdcAuthenticator	Kerberos Authenticator Plugin for JupyterHub

Spawners

Spawner	Description
LocalProcessSpawner	Default, built-in spawner starts single-user servers as local processes
dockerspawner	Spawn single-user servers in Docker containers
kubespawner	Kubernetes spawner for JupyterHub
sudospawner	Spawn single-user servers without being root
systemdspawner	Spawn single-user notebook servers using systemd
batchspawner	Designed for clusters using batch scheduling software
wrapspawner	WrapSpawner and ProfilesSpawner enabling runtime configuration of spawners

Docker

A starter docker image for JupyterHub gives a baseline deployment of JupyterHub using Docker.

Important: This jupyterhub/jupyterhub image contains only the Hub itself, with no configuration. In general, one needs to make a derivative image, with at least a jupyterhub_config.py setting up an Authenticator and/or a Spawner. To run the single-user servers, which may be on the same system as the Hub or not, Jupyter Notebook version 4 or greater must be installed.

The JupyterHub docker image can be started with the following command:

docker run -p 8000:8000 -d --name jupyterhub jupyterhub/jupyterhub jupyterhub

This command will create a container named jupyterhub that you can stop and resume with docker stop/start.

The Hub service will be listening on all interfaces at port 8000, which makes this a good choice for testing JupyterHub on your desktop or laptop.

If you want to run docker on a computer that has a public IP then you should (as in MUST) secure it with ssl by adding ssl options to your docker configuration or by using a ssl enabled proxy.

Mounting volumes will allow you to store data outside the docker image (host system) so it will be persistent, even when you start a new image.

The command docker exec -it jupyterhub bash will spawn a root shell in your docker container. You can use the root shell to create system users in the container. These accounts will be used for authentication in JupyterHub's default configuration.

Contributing

If you would like to contribute to the project, please read our contributor documentation and the CONTRIBUTING.md.

For a development install, clone the repository and then install from source:

git clone https://github.com/jupyterhub/jupyterhub
cd jupyterhub
pip3 install -r dev-requirements.txt -e .

If the pip3 install command fails and complains about lessc being unavailable, you may need to explicitly install some additional JavaScript dependencies:

npm install

This will fetch client-side JavaScript dependencies necessary to compile CSS.

You may also need to manually update JavaScript and CSS after some development updates, with:

python3 setup.py js    # fetch updated client-side js
python3 setup.py css   # recompile CSS from LESS sources

We use pytest for running tests:

pytest jupyterhub/tests

If you see test failures because of timeouts, you may wish to increase the ASYNC_TEST_TIMEOUT used by the pytest-tornado-plugin from the default of 5 seconds:

export ASYNC_TEST_TIMEOUT=15

Building the Docs locally

Install the dependencies:

python3 -m pip install -r docs/requirements.txt

Build the docs:

cd docs
make clean
make html

A note about platform support

JupyterHub is supported on Linux/Unix based systems.

JupyterHub officially does not support Windows. You may be able to use JupyterHub on Windows if you use a Spawner and Authenticator that work on Windows, but the JupyterHub defaults will not. Bugs reported on Windows will not be accepted, and the test suite will not run on Windows. Small patches that fix minor Windows compatibility issues (such as basic installation) may be accepted, however. For Windows-based systems, we would recommend running JupyterHub in a docker container or Linux VM.

Additional Reference: Tornado's documentation on Windows platform support

License

We use a shared copyright model that enables all contributors to maintain the copyright on their contributions.

All code is licensed under the terms of the revised BSD license.

Help and resources

We encourage you to ask questions on the Jupyter mailing list. To participate in development discussions or get help, talk with us on our JupyterHub Gitter channel.

• Reporting Issues
• JupyterHub tutorial
• Documentation for JupyterHub | PDF (latest) | PDF (stable)
• Documentation for JupyterHub's REST API
• Documentation for Project Jupyter | PDF
• Project Jupyter website

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Technical Overview | Installation | Configuration | Docker | Contributing | License | Help and Resources