docker-stacks/minimal-notebook

Minimal Jupyter Notebook Stack

Small image for working in the notebook and installing your own libraries

What it Gives You

• Fully-functional Jupyter Notebook 4.2.x
• Miniconda Python 3.x
• No preinstalled scientific computing packages
• Unprivileged user jovyan (uid=1000, configurable, see options) in group users (gid=100) with ownership over /home/jovyan and /opt/conda
• tini as the container entrypoint and start-notebook.sh as the default command
• A start-singleuser.sh script for use as an alternate command that runs a single-user instance of the Notebook server, as required by JupyterHub
• Options for HTTPS, password auth, and passwordless sudo

Basic Use

The following command starts a container with the Notebook server listening for HTTP connections on port 8888 without authentication configured.

docker run -d -p 8888:8888 jupyter/minimal-notebook

Notebook Options

You can pass Jupyter command line options through the start-notebook.sh command when launching the container. For example, to set a password hashed using IPython.lib.passwd() to secure the notebook server:

docker run -d -p 8888:8888 jupyter/minimal-notebook start-notebook.sh --NotebookApp.password='sha1:74ba40f8a388:c913541b7ee99d15d5ed31d4226bf7838f83a50e'

Or to set the base URL of the notebook server:

docker run -d -p 8888:8888 jupyter/minimal-notebook start-notebook.sh --NotebookApp.base_url=/some/path

You can sidestep the start-notebook.sh script entirely by specifying a command other than start-notebook.sh. If you do, the NB_UID and GRANT_SUDO features documented below will not work. See the Docker Options section for details.

Docker Options

You may customize the execution of the Docker container and the Notebook server it contains with the following optional arguments.

• -e PASSWORD="YOURPASS" - Configures Jupyter Notebook to require the given plain-text password. Should be combined with USE_HTTPS on untrusted networks. Note that this option is not as secure as passing a pre-hashed password on the command line as shown above.
• -e USE_HTTPS=yes - Configures Jupyter Notebook to accept encrypted HTTPS connections. If a pem file containing a SSL certificate and key is not provided (see below), the container will generate a self-signed certificate for you.
• -e NB_UID=1000 - Specify the uid of the jovyan user. Useful to mount host volumes with specific file ownership. For this option to take effect, you must run the container with --user root. (The start-notebook.sh script will su jovyan after adjusting the user id.)
• -e GRANT_SUDO=yes - Gives the jovyan user passwordless sudo capability. Useful for installing OS packages. For this option to take effect, you must run the container with --user root. (The start-notebook.sh script will su jovyan after adding jovyan to sudoers.) You should only enable sudo if you trust the user or if the container is running on an isolated host.
• -v /some/host/folder/for/work:/home/jovyan/work - Host mounts the default working directory on the host to preserve work even when the container is destroyed and recreated (e.g., during an upgrade).
• -v /some/host/folder/for/server.pem:/home/jovyan/.local/share/jupyter/notebook.pem - Mounts a SSL certificate plus key for USE_HTTPS. Useful if you have a real certificate for the domain under which you are running the Notebook server.

SSL Certificates

The notebook server configuration in this Docker image expects the notebook.pem file mentioned above to contain a base64 encoded SSL key and at least one base64 encoded SSL certificate. The file may contain additional certificates (e.g., intermediate and root certificates).

If you have your key and certificate(s) as separate files, you must concatenate them together into the single expected PEM file. Alternatively, you can build your own configuration and Docker image in which you pass the key and certificate separately.

For additional information about using SSL, see the following:

• The docker-stacks/examples for information about how to use Let's Encrypt certificates when you run these stacks on a publicly visible domain.
• The jupyter_notebook_config.py file for how this Docker image generates a self-signed certificate.
• The Jupyter Notebook documentation for best practices about running a public notebook server in general, most of which are encoded in this image.

Conda Environment

The default Python 3.x Conda environment resides in /opt/conda. The commands ipython, python, pip, easy_install, and conda (among others) are available in this environment.

JupyterHub

JupyterHub requires a single-user instance of the Jupyter Notebook server per user. To use this stack with JupyterHub and DockerSpawner, you must specify the container image name and override the default container run command in your jupyterhub_config.py:

# Spawn user containers from this image
c.DockerSpawner.container_image = 'jupyter/minimal-notebook'

# Have the Spawner override the Docker run command
c.DockerSpawner.extra_create_kwargs.update({
	'command': '/usr/local/bin/start-singleuser.sh'
})