[IPython-dev] Plans for notebook server / Authentication

[Fernando Perez]

Hi Andreas,

On Sat, Feb 22, 2014 at 2:16 AM, Andreas Hilboll <lists at hilboll.de> wrote:

> Hi IPython devs,
>
> first of all thanks a lot for such a great product!  I'd like to inquire
> what are your plans for the notebook server?  I'd want to deploy it on a
> large server, with access for all my users.  Ideally, the following
> things would hold:
>
> - all access to the notebook server is password-protected
> - users have to login using their username and password
> - users and passwords are not stored in IPython itself, but notebook
> server authenticates against the (Linux) server's own authentication
> system (/etc/passwd, or LDAP)
> - users have the possibility to browse their $HOME directory on the
> server and open/save notebooks from/to any place they have filesystem
> access to
>

Yup, this is pretty much the model we have in mind.  See below for more.


> An unrelated point which just comes to my mind is have version control
> inside the notebook. For this, it would be enough to have a button to
> push the notebook to some (git) repository, and have a link in the
> notebook itself to open that repository's homepage (obviously, this
> would only work with web-hosted repos, like gist, github, bitbucket, you
> name it).
>

For now, we'll be skipping any kind of external VC integration. While
certainly a nice convenience to have, it's a huge amount of work with lots
of UI questions to solve and lots of engineering required to interface with
all the possible (and changing!) external services. We simply don't have
the resources for something like that, and need to keep our scope well
contained.

Since that's something that users can already solve at the command line or
with their GUI tool of choice, that will remain the solution for the
foreseeable future.


> Are there plans in these directions?  How can I learn about which
> directions IPython is going?  Do you need help implementing the server
> stuff I've been mentioning?


We're finishing up the work for the 2.0 release, and will then switch gears
to the 3.0 one, whose major focus will be precisely the multiuser server.

You can find out more about these plans here, that represent our current
design docs as we captured our discussions during the dev meeting:

https://hackpad.com/IPython-Winter-2014-Development-Meeting-fKrExqKCWmC

We'll continue all further discussions about this, as usual, on this list
and our weekly public dev meetings on G+.

Cheers


f
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