Jupyter Notebook and Nginx Setup

Jun 21, 2016 • Akash Patro
The Jupyter Notebook is a web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and explanatory text. Uses include: data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, machine
learning and much more.

Jupyter project had a long history of development, It started with the Ipython project which provides a rich set of tools for computing and visualization with Python at it’s core. In the recent years the Ipython project broke into small components and the
Kernel is the core of Jupyter.

Jupyter supports multiple programming languages.

For more information click here

Jupyter Installation

I would suggest installing from continuum anaconda project. It provides a seemless package management and virtual env setup tool. And also provides a rich set of libraries bundled with the setup. You can find the instruction
here

Setting up the Notebook Server

You can start the notebook server as:

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jupyter notebook #for all the args jupyter notebook --help-all

The Notebook is a Python tornado Server which serves the Terminal and kernel UI.

Demonizing the Notebook Server For Ubuntu

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touch /etc/init/yourupstartjobname.conf #content for your Upstart file description "Service for jupyter notebook" author "You" start on filesystem or runlevel [2345] stop on shutdown respawn script echo $$ > /var/run/jupyter.pid exec /pathto/anaconda3/bin/jupyter notebook --no-browser --NotebookApp.allow_origin='*' --notebook-dir='/pathtoworkspace' end script pre-stop script rm /var/run/jupyter.pid end script

Setting Up Nginx server

As the Notebook server runs On Tornado which uses the websockets for some part of the Client Interaction. Standard nginx proxy pass uses the Http protocal. So we need to add some configuration to work.

For Interacting with the Terminal and And Kernel it uses the WSS(websocket protocal). You can find more about this

here

Heres My Nginx configuation.

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upstream notebook { server localhost:8888; } server{ listen 80; server_name xyz.abc.com; location / { proxy_pass http://notebook; proxy_set_header Host $host; } location ~ /api/kernels/ { proxy_pass http://notebook; proxy_set_header Host $host; # websocket support proxy_http_version 1.1; proxy_set_header Upgrade "websocket"; proxy_set_header Connection "Upgrade"; proxy_read_timeout 86400; } location ~ /terminals/ { proxy_pass http://notebook; proxy_set_header Host $host; # websocket support proxy_http_version 1.1; proxy_set_header Upgrade "websocket"; proxy_set_header Connection "Upgrade"; proxy_read_timeout 86400; } }

NOTE: If you are using Apache Server or AWS ELB you need similar kind of tweaks to work for you.