Make an ephemeral hub#
We can support users who want a mybinder.org type experience, but with better resources & faster startup. They get redirected to us when the public mybinder.org deployment can not support them (like this), or just because they want this experience.
The primary features offered would be:
No per-user authentication required.
A shared, systemwide password is present to protect against cryptobros abusing these resources.
No persistent storage
Pre-pulled images, for faster startup.
(1) and (3) also help reduce the amount of user data we store, reducing data privacy issues as well.
The limitations of this set up are:
No users means no admin users, so the JupyterHub configurator is unavailable. All config must be set in our config files, and deployed via GitHub.
No home page is visible, so our home page customizations do not work.
We do not cull users, because that would cause problems with counting active users. This is a trade-off, as if we end up with a huge list of users, it might slow down hub deployments.
Authentication with tmpauthenticator#
We will use tmpauthenticator to automatically create temporary users whenever any user comes to the hub. They will automatically get UUIDs assigned.
jupyterhub:
hub:
config:
JupyterHub:
authenticator_class: tmp
No persistent home directory#
As users are temporary and can not be accessed again, there is no reason to provide persistent storage. So we turn it all off - particularly the home directories.
# nfs functionality explicitly disabled in case a common.values.yaml
# file is used to enable it for all hubs in the cluster
nfs:
enabled: false
pv:
enabled: false
jupyterhub:
custom:
singleuserAdmin:
# Turn off trying to mount shared-readwrite folder for admins
extraVolumeMounts: []
singleuser:
initContainers: []
storage:
# No persistent storage should be kept to reduce any potential data
# retention & privacy issues.
type: none
extraVolumeMounts: []
Image configuration in chart#
The image needs to be specified in the chart directly and not via the JupyterHub
configurator because with tmpauthenticator we can’t distinguish admin users to
have such rights without providing it to every user.
jupyterhub:
singleuser:
# image could also be configured via singleuser.profileList configuration
image:
name: <image-name>
tag: <tag>
Enable hook pre-puller & disable JupyterHub#
Startup time is very important in ephemeral hubs, and since the JupyterHub configurator can not be used (no admin users), the hook pre-puller can be enabled.
jupyterhub:
custom:
jupyterhubConfigurator:
enabled: false
prePuller:
hook:
enabled: true
Disabling home page customizations#
tmpauthenticator doesn’t actually show the home page - it just launches
users directly into the notebook server. This means our home page customizations
are not applied anywhere. So we set them to empty strings.
jupyterhub:
custom:
homepage:
# tmpauthenticator does *not* show a home page by default,
# so these are not visible anywhere. But our schema requires we set
# them to strings, so we specify empty strings here.
templateVars:
org:
name: ""
url: ""
logo_url: ""
designed_by:
name: ""
url: ""
operated_by:
name: ""
url: ""
funded_by:
name: ""
url: ""
Use nbgitpuller for distributing content#
We encourage users to use nbgitpuller for distributing content. This allows creation of a specific link that will put users who click it on a specific notebook with a specific UI (such as lab, classic notebook, RStudio, etc).
The nbgitpuller link generator supports mybinder.org style links, but for use with ephemeral hubs, just use the regular ‘JupyterHub’ link generator. Firefox and Google Chrome extensions are also available.
Enable stronger anti-crypto abuse features for a hub#
Ephemeral hubs with public access must have stronger anti crypto abuse features enabled before going live.