Hello,
I am interested in setting up a Jupyter environment (Jupyter notebook, JupyterHub, or JupyterLab) or electronic notebook system for a single research group at an institution. I found documentation online explaining how this might be feasible, but figured it would be a good idea to ask the community.
Ideally, the group’s advisor will be the administrator who can access and view lab notebooks of the students. Any help or direction as to how I can accomplish this would be terrific. If it helps, I have a few logistical questions:
Can users access the same Jupyter environment even if they use different operating systems (e.g. Windows, Mac, Linux)?
How can the data which is stored in the notebooks be secured?
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Hi, this is definitely feasible and I do this with my own research group. I started out using a Mac as a server and have recently transitioned to a Linux box. Two senior researchers and I are administrators, and I am able to see user notebooks by logging in as that user. (This may be a security no-no but certainly facilitates collaboration.)
Jupyter and Jupyterhub are web technologies, so everybody accesses the server throught their browser. This makes the system OS-independent and in my experience browser independent as well.
Regarding security, our server is behind a firewall and requires a VPN for external access, as well as login via username and password.
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Hi scbarton,
Thank you very much for replying to my thread topic and sharing your experience with Jupyter. I am looking forward to introducing this web technology to our research group.
I have used a Jupyter notebook in the past, but have no prior experience with JupyterHub, JupyterLab, or establishing a server etc. Without burdening you with too many questions, how helpful was the JupyterHub documentation (found on the official site) when you were first getting started and did you use other resources? Any additional bits of information regarding your experience with the setup process would be extremely helpful.
Thank you again for taking the time to respond to my topic. I am excited to hear that this undertaking is feasible!
Regards,
ndstavin
The JupyterHub documentation was all I needed. There is also The Littlest JupyterHub but I installed on a Mac before that existed. For me, the trickiest part was setting up certificates for secure access using https: - how you accomplish that depends on your resources. I was able to get certificates through my institution but letsencrypt is also an option.
I should also note that launching JupyterHub using sudo is a potential security issue.
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