Granting users admin permissions on their container

How do you give users permission to install packages on their server?

Specifically I am trying to connect to mssql, as part of this I need to install freetds

Here are the two paths I go down:

$ apt-get install freetds
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (13: Permission denied)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?

So I try it with sudo

$ sudo apt-get install freetds

We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System
Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:

    #1) Respect the privacy of others.
    #2) Think before you type.
    #3) With great power comes great responsibility.

[sudo] password for jovyan:

and I don’t know the password for jovyan.

[parente]

At the CLI, you need to add --user root. For example, @nazeels command would become:

For example, @nazeels docker run -ti --rm --user root -p 8888:8888 -e GRANT_SUDO=yes jupyter/datascience-notebook:2c80cf3537ca start-notebook.sh

The container needs to start as root in order to add the otherwise unprivileged jovyan user the sudoers file. Once it does that, it the startup script becomes the jovyan user before launching the notebook server. (https://github.com/jupyter/docker-stacks/tree/master/datascience-notebook#docker-options in the -e GRANT_SUDO=yes bullet)

@minrk I’m not sure how to tell JupyterHub to launch the image as the root user to start (or if that’s even possible via config) other than to do what @kjschiroo suggested and build a custom image that always defaults to running as root.

[kjschiroo]

The way that I got around this was creating a new container image with a docker file like this:

FROM jupyter/datascience-notebook
USER root

Then I would set c.DockerSpawner.container_image to the name of the new container.

I think this introduces security concerns in some situations. In my case I was using it with only trusted users and within a private networks so the risks were acceptable.