I started working with Jupyter Notebooks in late November (2018), and was rewarded fairly quickly with the ability to create notebooks for Java (SciJava), Chemistry (rdkit), Engineering (scipy), graphics (matplotlib) and Geography (Basemap).

However, the real sticking point was these were all pages executing Jupyter on a local user account, running on a VirtualBox Ubuntu Linux server (18.10) that I’d created.

The real goal was to create a Jupyter system that would work for multiple users, so that I could use it for my new revision of “Introduction to Computing – Java” for Athabasca University. This meant running JupyterHub.

Along the way I moved to Ubuntu 18.04LTS (a checkpoint version) and spent hours on google, youtube and the plethora of Jupyter (and JupyterHub) pages. There were many frustrations along the way, from a complete communications breakdown in forums trying to get a site certificate (letsencrypt), to documentation and tutorials written in 2015 and never updated when everything (and I do mean everything) changed in the time since.

By December 5, I was able to create a functioning JupyterHub on huntrods.com with the proper certificate. The only kernel running was Python3, but it featured either PAM (local user) authentication or OAuth (Github login) authentication, so I was pretty happy.

BUT… (and this is huge) I really needed SciJava, or writing a Java course would be a bust.

The breakthrough came this week – yesterday, in fact. After repeated ‘banging head against the wall’ attempts, I was able to install SciJava for all users. With that success, it was relatively simple to install the other libraries (noted above) so that all my single-user demonstration notebooks ran in the new JupyterHub.

I was off and running, and quickly wrote my first notebook for the Java course. It’s everything I wanted, and more. It’s really a new way of “doing programming”, a mix of documentation and program code that works almost seamlessly together. Instead of a book with dead code examples, the code is ‘alive’ – press run and it executes. Better still, the student can change the ‘book code’ and immediately see the change take effect. It’s brilliant!

Today I worked on getting the Hub automated with supervisor. My next project is to store the notebook pages in a Git repository, either GitHub or local to the server, and then refresh them whenever users log in to the Hub.

Eventually I’ll use Git for notebook version management for all users, but one step at a time.