Jupyter

For a couple of projects I want to run I wanted to set up a Jupyter notebook server.

It was surprisingly tedious to set up, so I will just make a few notes here of what I needed to do on Debian 9.

Install

pip3 install jupyter

This will install jupyter in ~/.local/bin/. So need to add this to the PATH.

Setup Jupyter

When running ‘jupyter notebook’ it will serve the notebook on locahlost:8888. Since my server is remote, this is not much help. In order to have Apache serve it at my.url.com/jupyter, I had first to run:

jupyter notebook --generate-config
jupyter notebook password

This creates a .jupyter directory and a jupyter_notebook_config.json file inside.

Then edit .jupyter/jupyter-notebook-config.py and set the following params

c.NotebookApp.allow_origin = '*'
c.NotebookApp.base_url = '/jupyter'
c.NotebookApp.certfile = '/absolute/path/to/mycert.pem'
c.NotebookApp.ip = 'localhost'
c.NotebookApp.keyfile = '/absolute/path/to/mykey.key'
c.NotebookApp.open_browser = False
c.NotebookApp.password = 'paste_hashed_password_here'
c.NotebookApp.trust_xheaders = True

Set up Apache

This is where it got annoying. But after a couple of hours of googling, this is what worked for me:

In a SSL-enabled VirtualHost:

Pay attention to the trailing slashes

    SSLCertificateFile /absolute/path/to/mycert.pem
    SSLCertificateKeyFile /absolute/path/to/mykey.key
    SSLProxyEngine On
    SSLProxyVerify none
    SSLProxyCheckPeerCN off
    SSLProxyCheckPeerName off
    SSLProxyCheckPeerExpire off

    ServerName localhost
    ProxyPreserveHost On
    ProxyRequests Off

    <Location "/jupyter">
        ProxyPass https://localhost:8888/jupyter
        ProxyPassReverse https://localhost:8888/jupyter
        RequestHeader set Origin "https://localhost:8888"
        ProxyPassReverseCookieDomain localhost mydomain.name
    </Location>

    <Location "/jupyter/api/kernels/">
        ProxyPass wss://localhost:8888/jupyter/api/kernels/
        ProxyPassReverse wss://localhost:8888/jupyter/api/kernels/
    </Location>

Off topic

I followed the steps here to automate site deployment.