Enabling Real Time Collaboration

[Camille]

Hi,

How can I enable real time collaboration in JupyterHub?
The doc (https://jupyterlab.readthedocs.io/en/stable/user/rtc.html) says

Editors are not collaborative by default; to activate it, start JupyterLab with the --collaborative flag.

How can I do that in a Cloudron env?
Thanks,
Camille

[jdaviescoates]

@Camille does this help?

https://docs.cloudron.io/apps/jupyterhub/#other-custom-configuration

[Camille]

@jdaviescoates Thanks.
It's not clear to me what parameters can be changed in /app/data/customconfig.py
besides c.Spawner.mem_limit and c.DockerSpawner.container_image.
I searched in https://jupyterhub.readthedocs.io/en/stable/search.html?q=collaborative but didn't find many clues.
I'll try c.Spawner.cmd = 'jupyter-lab --collaborative' but that'll be mostly guesswork

[girish]

@Camille I think the collaborative flag only works with BinderHub - https://github.com/jupyterhub/binderhub . With JupyterHub, I think https://github.com/jupyterhub/jupyterhub/issues/394 was the issue tracker task to fix this , but it didn't progress far.

Also, to pass extra args, use something like this in customconfig.py:

c.Spawner.environment = {
    'NOTEBOOK_ARGS': '--collaborative'
}

(this comes from https://github.com/jupyter/docker-stacks/blob/master/base-notebook/start-notebook.sh#L26 and https://github.com/jupyterhub/jupyterhub/blob/dcf21d53fd9e6c131a269550c0a46f08ca9df5bb/docs/source/reference/spawners.md#environment-variables-and-command-line-arguments

[Camille]

Thanks @girish for all the pointers!

[Camille]

Reading https://github.com/jupyterhub/jupyterhub/issues/3578 and https://discourse.jupyter.org/t/jupyterhub-collaboration-and-tags/11259
it seems that collaborative flag would also work with JupyterHub.
It tried adding c.LabApp.collaborative = True in customconfig.py with no luck.
I'll investigate more thouroughly later.

[girish]

@Camille The sharing involves using this "token" for authentication which I think works only on Binder. I am not 100% sure about this though, documentation is very sparse.

[girish]

So, from https://jupyter.org/binder , "BinderHub is a web application that allows users to create sharable, interactive, reproducible environments from code repositories" . Docs are here - https://binderhub.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ . There is says "BinderHub is a kubernetes-based cloud service that allows users to share reproducible interactive computing environments from code repositories." .

I think we need to understand how all this ties into this "token" for collaboration.

[Camille]

Hi @girish Token authentication works great on our Cloudron JupyterHub. We can share notebooks fine but with no real time collaboration: we just get the usual overwrite problems.

[girish]

@Camille Oh, that's interesting. Can you tell me how you enabled it and how you made it work ? (i.e just shared notebooks without real time)

[Camille]

@girish Actually, I'm not really sure how we got there
I have installed the https://github.com/jupyterlab-contrib/jupyterlab-link-share extension, which kind of works, but we have to manually add the token to the URL it provides.
So maybe it enabled settings in the background.
I will try to redo it from a fresh install and keep you posted.

[RubenFixit]

Adding the following to /app/data/customconfig.py worked for me:

c.Spawner.args = ['--collaborative']

You also need to run /app/code/remove_notebook_containers.py after making changes.

For a list of parameters check out: https://jupyterhub.readthedocs.io/en/stable/api/spawner.html