System environment
The following is the environment in each Jupyter notebook server exists. This is a normal Linux environment, and you are encouraged to use the shell console to interact with it. In fact, you will need to use the console to do various things, and you will probably need to do some scripting.
Why is everything not a push-button solution? Everyone has such unique needs, and we need to solve all of them. We can only accomplish our goals if people are able to - and do - do their own scripting.
Linux container
Each time you launch your server, you get a personal Linux container. Everything (except the data) gets reset each time it stops. From the user perspective, it looks like a normal Linux container. Unlike some setups, we allow students to acknowledge and browse the whole Linux system. (other systems try to hide it, but in reality they can’t stop students from accessing it).
Data
/notebooks/is your per-user area. It’s what you see by default, and is shared among all your courses./course/is the course directory (a nbgrader concept). It is available only to instructors. You need to read the nbgrader instructions to understand how this works./coursedata/is an optional shared course data directory. Instructors can put files here so that students can access them without having to copy data over and over. Instructors can write here, students can only read. Remeber to make it readable to all students:chmod -R a+rX /coursedata./srv/nbgrader/exchangeis the exchange directory, a nbgrader concept but you generally don’t have to worry about it yourself.
Data is available from outside JupyterHub: it is hosted on an Aalto-wide server provided by Aalto. Thus, you can access it on your laptops, on Aalto public shell servers, and more. A fast summary is below, but see Accessing JupyterHub (jupyter.cs) data for the main info.
From your own laptop: The SMB server
jhnas.org.aalto.fipath/vol/jupyter/{course,$username}.Linux: “Connect to server” from the file browser, URL
smb://jhnas.org.aalto.fi/vol/jupyterMac: same as Linux
Windows:
\\jhnas.org.aalto.fi\vol\jupyter.
Data is available on public Aalto shell servers such as
koshandlyta, at/m/jhnas/jupyter/.
Software
For Python, software is distributed through conda. You can install your own packages using
pip or conda, but everything is reset when you restart the
server. This is sort of by design: a person can’t permanently break
their own environment (restarting gets you to a good state), but you
have your own flexibility.
You should ask us to install common software which you are your students need, instead of installing it yourself each time. But you should feel free to install it yourself to get your work done until you do that.
Jupyter
Both Jupyter Lab and classic notebooks are installed, along with a lot of extensions. If you need more extensions, let us know. All courses use only the classic notebook interface by default, because the nbgrader web extensions do not work from Lab.