Run a Secure Jupyter Notebook Server on CentOS 7

A guide to installing and setting up a Jupyter notebook server with Python 2.7 and 3 kernels for a local network in RHEL 7/CentOS 7/Oracle Linux 7.

First, install the required dependencies for Jupyter Notebook.

Info: the following repos are no longer functional.

Install dependencies and repositories:

sudo yum install epel-release
yum install -y python-pip python-devel python-virtualenv
yum groupinstall 'Development Tools'

Set the virtual environment and install Jupyter Notebook using pip.

virtualenv jupyter-virtualenv
source jupyter-virtualenv/bin/activate
pip install jupyter

Run Jupyter Notebook and test that the installation works properly on your PC/workstation.

jupyter notebook

Generate the configuration file for the Jupyter Notebook. The configuration file will be different for each user on the machine to avoid conflicts. Generating a separate configuration file lets users run separate instances of a notebook server with user-specified passwords.

jupyter notebook --generate-config

Before starting the notebook server, set up a password for your instance using the following command.

jupyter notebook password

If you don’t set up a password, the default password is the access token and can be found in the terminal (?token=).

[I 11:31:38.714 NotebookApp] 0 active kernels
[I 11:31:38.714 NotebookApp] The Jupyter Notebook is running at: http://localhost:8888/?token=bf955b36f6957215ee6c774bcfeb23649334fb88f5040087
[I 11:31:38.714 NotebookApp]

Use Control-C to stop this server and shut down all kernels (twice to skip confirmation).
[W 11:31:38.715 NotebookApp] No web browser found: could not locate runnable browser.
[C 11:31:38.715 NotebookApp]

Copy and paste this URL into your browser when you connect for the first time,
to login with a token:
    http://localhost:8888/?token=bf955b36f6957215ee6c774bcfeb23649334fb88f5040087
[I 11:31:58.671 NotebookApp] 302 GET /?token=bf955b36f6957215ee6c774bcfeb23649334fb88f5040087 (::1) 0.82ms

Once the previous steps are done, edit the notebook configuration file generated using the —generate-config option. The configuration file will be located in the following path.

cat ~/.jupyter/jupyter_notebook_config.py

Use your favorite text editor to open the file and make the following changes to allow LAN access. Set the IP to ’*’ to bind on all networking interfaces of the machine. Also, you can use only a public IP address if your machine has one.

c.NotebookApp.ip = '*'

If you want to set up a password manually, change the following parameter.

c.NotebookApp.password = u'sha1:bcd259ccf...'

Code to generate a hashed password:

In [1]: from notebook.auth import passwd
In [2]: passwd()
Enter password:
Verify password:
Out[2]: 'sha1:67c9e60bb8b6:9ffede0825894254b2e042ea597d771089e11aed'

Launching a browser is not necessary when you are running a server.

c.NotebookApp.open_browser = False

Change the port for the notebook server to avoid conflicts with other applications; by default it is 8888. If multiple users are running a notebook server, use a different port in each case.

c.NotebookApp.port = 8888 #Change if already assigned to another service.

Add the port to the firewall and reload.

sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=8888/tcp --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --reload
firewall-cmd --list-all

After configuration, enable Jupyter Notebook to run in the background with nohup().

nohup jupyter notebook &

To stop the server, kill the processes.

lsof nohup.out
kill -9

When your system Python version is 2.7 but you also want to add Python 3 to the Jupyter Notebook, the following code will help.

Enable kernels

Python 2

python2 -m pip install ipykernel
python2 -m ipykernel install --user

Python 3

python3 -m pip install ipykernel
python3 -m ipykernel install --user