Userlist must be known a priori

When using the deployment for a workshop, tutorial, etc, the userlist is not necessarily known beforehand. It is preferred to not require a whitelist of users.

In the past, I also tried tmpnb. The problem that occurs in this case is that users will go to the site many times, hit refresh repeatedly, try to reconnect after loosing their connection on poor or Wifi or coming back from a break, etc. Since their session is not re-used, a new container is launched each time, which quickly consumes compute resources.

CC: @willingc @minrk

[thewtex]

+1, Thanks @willingc, @parente, @rgbkrk !

[parente]

This would be nice, but I did not test it or see it in the docs.

The empty whitelist doc appears on the traitlet which means it should appear when you run jupyterhub --help-all. Here it is in source:

https://github.com/jupyterhub/jupyterhub/blob/f1bdf6247abe3f41d571ea94116cf64ec7ed45df/jupyterhub/auth.py#L42

However, there would not be an admin user in this case?

You can still define admin users. You just have to know what their usernames will be when they authenticate for the first time. For example, I can deploy Jupyter Hub with:

1. GitHub OAuth
2. an empty whitelist
3. parente in the admin list

to get an instance where anyone with a GitHub account can log in, but only GitHub user parente has admin capabilities on the Hub.