Need clarification of versions of helm chart, hub and lab

JupyterHub
1

Hello,

Could somebody clarify to me the dependencies between versions when using z2jh installed via the helm chart, and the pip installed jupyterhub/jupyterlab packages install in our docker images?

I install jupyterhub in kubernetes with currently the helm chart 2.0.0 which says the app version is 3.0.0 I assume it means the version of jupyterhub.
I see there is the helm chart version 3.2.1 for instance now, that is for app version 4.0.2

Then I create a custom docker image from jupyter/docker-stacks-foundation:python in which I pip install jupyterhub==4.0.0 and jupyterlab (unpinned → I get 3.6.7).

I hadn’t noticed all those versions everywhere until now.
I am trying to test jupyterlab 4.x and update the helm chart and jupyterhub to the latest possible if I can find necessary extensions compatible with 4.x.

Thanks for any insights that could help my confused mind :slight_smile:

2

I at least sanitize it this way for now:

  • helm chart 3.2.1 → Jupyterhub 4.0.2
  • pip install jupyterhub 4.0.2 in the docker image
  • pip install jupyterlab 3.6.7 (for now) in the docker image

I guess it makes sense that the version of jupyterhub in the server docker image should be the same as the one in z2jh. Or does it? I am not familiar with how it works under the hood, but would assume that the communication between the server runtime and the hub should be compatible “enough” to avoid weird issues.

3

There are very little constraints, but keeping the jupyterhub’s major version deployed by z2jh ±1 on the major version installed in the user images is probably going to work well. So if the user image has major version 3-5 and the deployed hub has version 4, thats probably fine.

I wouldn’t pin the any version constraint on jupyterhub (not major and especially not minor/patch versions in images), at least as long as I’d be updating z2jh at least yearly.

It is probably also relevant to use a modern or at least non-ancient jupyter-server version in the user environment, to get well tested and solid interactions between it and jupyterhub.

4

thanks for confirming and adding explanations