Document how to set environment variables for user notebooks

Hi,

First of all, thank you for your great work on this project! It really is a pleasure to work with it.

I am trying to set an environment variable, so I can access it using %env MY_ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE within Jupyter notebooks. Despite trying for several hours, I have not been able to achieve this simple task.

I tried the following approaches:

• setting it in .bashrc
• setting it in .profile
• setting it in the SystemD configuration file
• adding a new configuration file in the directory /opt/tljh/config/jupyterhub_config.d
• setting it via kernel parameters (see this StackOverflow answer)
• setting it in the spawner configuration
• setting it via sudo tljh-config set user_environment.MY_ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE my_value
• adding the environment variable name to the list of forwarded environment variables

I would be most grateful if somebody could tell me the correct way to set an environment variable on the Linux system so that I could use it within my notebooks. Thank you!

[yuvipanda]

Apologies for the delayed response, and thank you for opening this issue.

You can put standard JupyterHub config directives under /opt/tljh/config/jupyterhub_config.d/<some-config-file-name>. So you may create a file at /opt/tljh/config/jupyterhub_config.d/environment.py and add the following contents:

c.Spawner.environment = {
        'TEST': 'blah'
}

This should put the environment variables in your users’ notebook servers.

[ksbek]

Apologies for the delayed response, and thank you for opening this issue.

You can put standard JupyterHub config directives under /opt/tljh/config/jupyterhub_config.d/<some-config-file-name>. So you may create a file at /opt/tljh/config/jupyterhub_config.d/environment.py and add the following contents:

c.Spawner.environment = {
        'TEST': 'blah'
}

This should put the environment variables in your users’ notebook servers.

@yuvipanda I want to set env vars per user. How can I do that? Thanks in advance.