iiab/roles/jupyterhub

JupyterHub programming environment with student Notebooks

Secondary schools may want to consider JupyterHub to integrate coding with dynamic interactive graphing — A New Way to Think About Programming — allowing students to integrate science experiment results and program output within their own blog-like "Jupyter Notebooks."

• Jupyter Notebooks are widely used in the scientific community:
  • Institutional FAQ
  • Getting Started
• Students create their own accounts on first use — e.g. at http://box.lan/jupyterhub — just as if they're logging in regularly (unfortunately the login screen doesn't make that clear, but the teacher does not need to be involved!)
  • A student can then sign in with their username and password, to gain access to their files (Jupyter Notebooks).
  • The teacher should set and protect JupyterHub's overall Admin password, just in case. As with student accounts, the login screen doesn't make that clear — so just log in with username Admin using any password that you want to become permanent.
• Individual student folders are created in /var/lib/private/ on the Internet-in-a-Box (IIAB) server:
  • A student will only be able to see their own work — they do not have privileges outside of their own folder.
  • Students may upload Jupyter Notebooks to the IIAB server, and download the current state of their work via a normal browser.

Settings

Linux administrators please see /opt/iiab/jupyterhub/etc/jupyterhub/jupyterhub_config.py which originates from:

https://github.com/iiab/iiab/blob/master/roles/jupyterhub/templates/jupyterhub_config.py

Note that /opt/iiab/jupyterhub is a Python 3 virtual environment, that can be activated with the usual formula:

source /opt/iiab/jupyterhub/bin/activate

PAWS/Jupyter Notebooks for Python Beginners

While PAWS is a little bit off topic, if you have an interest in Wikipedia, please do see this 23m 42s video "Intro to PAWS/Jupyter notebooks for Python beginners" by Chico Venancio, from 2021-06-01.

He explains PAWS as a "powerful Python execution environment http://paws.wmcloud.org [allowing] ordinary folks to write interactive scripts to work with Wikimedia content."

Known Issues

• 2021-08-07: The page that allows you to reset/change your own password is not accessible. Likewise Admin users cannot reset/change the password of any individual user at this time. _#2918
  • If necessary, a Linux administrator can delete the /passwords.dbm.db file at the very top of your Linux filesystem, allowing all JupyterHub users to (re)create new passwords. This does work, but is very heavy-handed. _{PR #2892}
• 2021-08-07: Teachers (i.e. Admin users) cannot currently access the very helpful "administrator's page" discussed at JupyterHub FAQ >> "How do I manage users?" and roles/jupyterhub/templates/jupyterhub_config.py#L1049-L1054 >> "Admin users have extra privileges". _#2919
• 2021-08-08: Password dbm file /passwords.dbm.db should be moved from the top of the filesystem to a better place — e.g. to /opt/iiab/jupyterhub/etc/ ? _{PR #2892}