Using Jupyterhub in the Classroom : Setup and Lessons Learned

Abstract

Jupyter notebooks, formerly known as iPython notebooks, are widely used for data analysis and other areas of scientific computing. Notebooks can contain formatted text, images, LaTeX formulas, as well as code that can be executed, edited and executed again. A jupyter hub is a multi-user server for jupyter notebooks, and setting up a jupyter hub is a complex endeavour that involves many steps. The instructions found online for setup often have to be customized for different operating systems, and there is not one source that covers all aspects of setup. This paper describes the details of setting up a jupyter hub environment on a server running CentOS 7, and includes a discussion of lessons learned from using this system in data science classes.