c.DockerSpawner.notebook_dir not working with JupyterHub 0.8

Hi,

I am following this repo to setup my JupyterHub instance on a single server.

Recently, the repo was upgraded to JupyterHub 0.8 and I followed the changes. However, since the upgrade, the parameter c.DockerSpawner.notebook_dir doesn’t seem to have an effect and the single user servers are always started at /home/jovyan instead of /home/jovyan/work

I tried giving different values to the configuration param but it always starts at home directory.

I rollbacked my system to old code before the changes made in last few days and it worked again.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks, Bhopesh

[minrk]

Why would setting it explicitly create a problem?

It’s not why, it’s how. By default, DockerSpawner builds the command to launch the docker image from config such as c.DockerSpawner.cmd, c.DockerSpawner.ip, etc. There are also some options that allow you to bypass any logic in DockerSpawner, and talk directly to Docker. extra_create_kwargs is one such option. By specifying extra_create_kwargs.command, you are saying that you have decided what the command to launch should be, and that DockerSpawner should not try to build the command itself.

[bbhopesh]

I figured a fix by trial and error but I don’t know why my fix is working. There’s some problem with the start-singleuser.sh script.

Removing following two lines from jupyterhub_config.py starts the single user notebook servers at /home/jovyan/work, otherwise single user notebook servers always start at /home/jovyan irrespective of value of c.DockerSpawner.notebook_dir.

Lines to be removed from jupyterhub_config.py

spawn_cmd = os.environ.get('DOCKER_SPAWN_CMD', "start-singleuser.sh")
c.DockerSpawner.extra_create_kwargs.update({ 'command': spawn_cmd })