JupyterHub 2.0

Hubs and roles and scopes, oh my!

We’ve just published JupyterHub 2.0, our biggest release in a while.

Roles and scopes (RBAC)

Thanks to the work of Omar Richardson and Ivana Huskova and more contributors along the way, JupyterHub now has fine-grained control of permissions, via scopes (a role is a named collection of scopes).

This makes JupyterHub more secure because you no longer need to give every user or service full admin permissions if they need to take one elevated action (such as a cull-idle service). Now, you can give users and services exactly the permissions they actually need. admin still exists, but nothing should need to be an admin anymore. Fine-grained scopes also allow new configurations that weren’t previously available, such as granting instructors permission to access their students’ servers, which is useful with JupyterLab’s new real-time collaboration features, without needing to grant them full admin permissions, or even access to servers of users not in their specific class.

The significant change in how permissions work means that upgrading to 2.0 requires some downtime. You will need to shut down all services and single-user servers across the upgrade, and make sure you upgrade JupyterHub to 2.0 in both the user environment and the Hub environment at the same time.

All tokens issued prior to the 2.0 upgrade will be revoked.

As always, back up your database before upgrading!

Read more about roles and scopes in the docs.

JupyterLab by default

2.0 also marks JupyterHub’s transition to using JupyterLab as the default UI. You can stick with the classic notebook server with:

c.Spawner.environment = {
    "JUPYTERHUB_SINGLEUSER_APP": "notebook.notebookapp.NotebookApp",
}

or try RetroLab, a classic-style UI built on the newer Jupyter Server:

c.Spawner.default_url = "/retro/"

(assuming you’ve installed it in the user environment, with e.g. pip install retrolab).

And more

There are various other changes and improvements in 2.0, including a new admin UI, API pagination, and no longer relying on any command-line arguments for single-user servers. Check out the changelog for more details.

We encourage you to take 2.0 for a spin, try out the roles and scopes, and let us know how it goes.

Thanks to all the contributors who helped us with 2.0, especially prerelease testers!