JupyterHub

JupyterHub is a server that gives multiple users access to Jupyter notebooks, running an independent Jupyter notebook server for each user.

To use JupyterHub, you need a Unix server (typically Linux) running somewhere that is accessible to your team on the network. The JupyterHub server can be on an internal network at your organisation, or it can run on the public internet (in which case, take care with security). Users access JupyterHub in a web browser, by going to the IP address or domain name of the server.

Different authenticators control access to JupyterHub. The default one (pam) uses the user accounts on the server where JupyterHub is running. If you use this, you will need to create a user account on the system for each user on your team. Using other authenticators, you can allow users to sign in with e.g. a Github account, or with any single-sign-on system your organisation has.

Next, spawners control how JupyterHub starts the individual notebook server for each user. The default spawner will start a notebook server on the same machine running under their system username. The other main option is to start each server in a separate container, often using Docker.

JupyterHub runs as three separate parts:

  • The multi-user Hub (Python & Tornado)
  • A configurable http proxy (NodeJS)
  • Multiple single-user Jupyter notebook servers (Python & 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

Contents:

Developer Documentation

Indices and tables