Design goals

Instructors and maintainers

When using this repository to deploy JupyterHub and nbgrader, individuals should be able to have a deployment that is as simple as possible:

• No Docker use.
• NGINX as a frontend proxy, serving static assets, and a termination point for SSL/TLS.
• A single server.
• Ansible for configuration.
• Optionally, use Let’s Encrypt for generating SSL certificates.

JupyterHub

• Start from:
  • An empty Ubuntu latest stable server with SSH key based access.
  • A valid DNS name.
  • A formatted and mounted directory to use for user home directories.
  • The assumption that all users of the system will be “trusted,” meaning that you would given them a user-level shell account on the server.
• Always have SSL/TLS enabled.
• Specify local drives to be mounted.
• Manage the running of jupyterhub and nbgrader using supervisor.
• Optionally, monitor the state of the server and set email alerts using NewRelic. The built-in monitoring of your cloud provider may also be used.
• Specify admin users of JupyterHub.
• Add the public SSH keys of GitHub users who need to be able to ssh to the server as root for administration.
• Manage users and authentication using either:
  • Regular Unix users and PAM (Pluggable authentication modules)
  • GitHub OAuth

nbgrader

• Run nbgrader and configure:
  • The course name.
  • The instructors username.
  • Graders’ usernames.
  • The location of the nbgrader config.

Students

End users of this deployment should be able to:

• Use the following Jupyter kernels.
  • Python version 3 using the IPython kernel with the main Python libraries for data science.
  • Bash kernel <https://github.com/takluyver/bash_kernel>
• Sign in using their GitHub or Unix credentials.
• Have a persistent home directory.
• Have outbound network access.