Quick Start

You are an instructor and want to use Jupyter Notebooks or Rstudio in courses or workshops without hassle of setting up the environment for your students?

  1. Fill in this form to apply for a JupyterHub instance.
  2. We will contact you for an intake meeting to gather the requirements and get things going.
  3. We will setup a JupyterHub instance accoording to your needs and provide you a web link to it. If you choose to launch your instance from Toledo (the preferred method), you also get a key and secret to configure the tool provider link in Toledo.
  4. You provide a public git repository with the course content on GitLab (or GitHub).
  5. You can use the Link Generator to create a web link to launch the environment for your students with the course content loaded from the provided git repository.

For more information, please see FAQ.

FAQ

What is a Jupyter Notebook?

Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web-based application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text. Uses include: data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, data visualization, machine learning, and much more.

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What is JupyterHub?

JupyterHub brings the power of notebooks to groups of users. It gives users access to computational environments and resources without burdening the them with installation and maintenance tasks. Users - including students, researchers, and data scientists - can get their work done in their own workspaces on shared resources which can be managed efficiently by system administrators.

What is JupyterLab?

JupyterLab is the latest web-based interactive development environment (IDE) for Jupyter notebooks, code, and data.

What is Rstudio?

Rstudio is an integrated development environment specialized for R, a programming language for statistical computing and graphics. It can be used as alternative for JupyterLab on our JupyterHub environment.

Who can use this service?

This JupyterHub service is open to instructors and students of the Science, Engineering and Technology Group; Instructors can request a JupyterHub instance for their course(s) on the SET-IT Service Portal.

Request a JupyterHub Instance

How do I distribute course content to students?

We recommend using nbgitpuller to make course content available to students in JupyterHub. You can construct a nbgitpuller link with our custom link generator, to launch it from Toledo or send it to your students. When they click it, the course content will be pulled into their home directory, and the appropriate file will be opened.

Link Generator

How does nbgitpuller merge changes of my course content?

nbgitpuller tries to make sure that the student who clicked the link never has to manually interact with the git repo containing the course content. This requires some opinionated choices on how we handle various cases where both the student (end user) and instructor (author of the repo) modified the repository.

Here you can find a description of how the the various possible cases are handled each time the student clicks the nbgitpuller are described.

What packages & libraries are available?

JupyterHub instances come with an image based on the jupyter/scipy-notebook or the jupyter/r-notebook stack images by default. Many commonly packages from the scientific Python/R ecosystem are pre-installed. See the above base images for the list of default installed packages.

It's also possible to base the image of your JupyterHub instance on another jupyter stack image (see Jupyter Docker Stacks documentation) and/or provide a custom requirements.txt or conda environment.yml file to include additional packages.

Contact us and we setup your custom image as needed.

How can I request new packages or updates?

If you need to add new packages or update existing ones in your JupyterHub instance, you can submit a request on our service portal. We will review your request and make the necessary changes in your hub's image.

Can I install my own packages?

Yes, you can! You can use pip install package-name or mamba install package-name to install a Python package. With R, you can use install.packages(). To prevent individual user environments diverging from each other too much, your user installed packages only last the length of your server.

Where can I find more documentation?

Here are some references that you might find useful:

Can a package be installed for all my students?

Yes, it can! Please open a ticket at SET-IT with your request.

I have many other questions!

Please contact SET-IT and we will help answer them!

Link Generator

We recommend using nbgitpuller to make course content available to students in JupyterHub. You can construct a nbgitpuller link with our custom link generator below, to create a web link in Toledo. When they click it, the course content will be pulled into their home directory, and the appropriate file will be opened.

Must be a valid web URL
The URL of your JupyterHub instance
Must be a valid git URL
The URL of the Git repository holding the course content
branch
Use main instead of master for new GitHub or GitLab repositories
Must specify a branch name
This file or directory from within the repo will open when user clicks the link.
The name of the directory to clone the repository into. By default, the "humanised" name of the source repository is used (e.g. demo for https://gitlab.kuleuven.be/path/to/demo.git). This path should be relative to the working directory.