Access home directories of users of a hub

Sometimes, it is necessary to access the NFS home directories of users on a hub. Perhaps they’ve modified a dotfile (like .bash_profile or .bashrc) that prevents their server from starting, or we need to archive a large file there.

Sample notebook log from non-starting pod due to a dotfile that doesn’t have correct PATH:w

/srv/start: line 23: exec: jupyterhub-singleuser: not found

The exec homes subcommand of the deployer can help us here.

export CLUSTER_NAME=<cluster-name>
export HUB_NAME=<hub-name>

deployer exec homes $CLUSTER_NAME $HUB_NAME

Will open a bash shell with all the home directories of all the users of $HUB_NAME in $CLUSTER_NAME  mounted in read-write fashion under /home/.

Warning

BE CAREFUL! DO NOT DELETE THINGS HERE WITHOUT BEING SURE YOU WANT THEM GONE.

If in doubt, rename files which will allow the server to start up again and preserve the file for the user so they can correct the file contents.