Spawners and single-user notebook servers

A Spawner starts each single-user notebook server. Since the single-user server is an instance of jupyter notebook, an entire separate multi-process application, many aspects of that server can be configured and there are a lot of ways to express that configuration.

At the JupyterHub level, you can set some values on the Spawner. The simplest of these is Spawner.notebook_dir, which lets you set the root directory for a user’s server. This root notebook directory is the highest-level directory users will be able to access in the notebook dashboard. In this example, the root notebook directory is set to ~/notebooks, where ~ is expanded to the user’s home directory.

c.Spawner.notebook_dir = '~/notebooks'

You can also specify extra command line arguments to the notebook server with:

c.Spawner.args = ['--debug', '--profile=PHYS131']

This could be used to set the user’s default page for the single-user server:

c.Spawner.args = ['--NotebookApp.default_url=/notebooks/Welcome.ipynb']

Since the single-user server extends the notebook server application, it still loads configuration from the jupyter_notebook_config.py config file. Each user may have one of these files in $HOME/.jupyter/. Jupyter also supports loading system-wide config files from /etc/jupyter/, which is the place to put configuration that you want to affect all of your users.