Run JupyterHub as a system service
Running JupyerHub as a system service allows JupyterHub to run continuously even if we are not logged into the server. It also keeps JupyterHub running while when we log into the server and make any changes.
To run JupyterHub as a system service (according to this wiki
), we need to create a service file in the /etc/systemd/system directory. cd into the directory and have a look around. We see a couple files that end in .service.
$ cd /etc/systemd/system $ ls cloud-init.target.wants network-online.target.wants dbus-org.freedesktop.thermald.service paths.target.wants default.target.wants sockets.target.wants final.target.wants sshd.service getty.target.wants sysinit.target.wants graphical.target.wants syslog.service iscsi.service timers.target.wants multi-user.target.wants
Create a new .service file called jupyterhub.service
pwd /etc/systemd/system $ sudo nano jupyterhub.service
In the jupyterhub.service file, add the following. Note that as
part of the PATH environment variable
/srv/jupyterhub/venv/bin/ is included. This is the path to our virtual environment. As part of the ExecStart= section, we include a flag for our JupyterHub config file located
at /etc/jupyterhub/jupyterhub_config.py. The example also
includes a setting for GitLab that will only become relevant later.
Feel free to not include that for now, especially if you do not plan
on using GitLab for user authentication.
[Unit] Description=JupyterHub After=syslog.target network.target [Service] User=root Environment="PATH=/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/srv/jupyterhub/venv/bin/:/opt/gurobi/linux64/bin" Environment="GITLAB_HOST=https://gitlab.lrz.de" ExecStart=/srv/jupyterhub/venv/bin/jupyterhub -f /etc/jupyterhub/jupyterhub_config.py [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target
Save and exit the nano text editor with [Ctrl]+[x] and [y] then [Enter].
Now we need to reload the system daemon. After the system daemon is reloaded, we can run JupyterHub as a system service using the command: sudo systemctl <start|stop|status> jupyterhub
$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload $ sudo systemctl start jupyterhub
We can see if JupyterHub is running with:
$ sudo systemctl status jupyterhub Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/jupyterhub.service; Active: active (running)
Test local Authentication
Now we can point a web browser at our domain name and log into JupyterHub as our non-root user ritter and the password we set for ritter on the server. This time we are running with SSL security in place and even if we browse to http://m09vm14.ma.tum.de, Nginx will forward us to https://m09vm14.ma.tum.de.
The JupyterHub login screen looks something like the screen capture below:
A couple times I thought that JupyterHub was running after using systemctl start jupyterhub, but the JupyterHub wasn't working when I went to the server's web address. It turned out that JupyterHub wasn't running when I keyed in systemctl status jupyterhub. Most times looking for an error and tracking down the the error worked, but one time it seemed to be a problem with the http-configurable-proxy.
The following command will shut down the proxy if you get stuck like I did (insert the number corresponding to the configurable-http-proxy process after the kill command):
$ ps aux | grep configurable-http-proxy $ kill ####
Summary
In this section, we got JupyterHub running as a system service. We created a jupyterhub.service file in the /etc/systemd/system/ directory and made sure to include the PATH to our (jupyterhub) virtual environment and the path to our jupyterhub_config.py file. Finally, we reloaded the system service daemon and started the JupyterHub service. Then be opened a web browser and keyed in our domain name and logged into JupyterHub.
Next Steps
The next step is to add users to our server and see if we can log in as a different user than our non-root sudo user, ritter.