Emacs | C2Bio

Containerized Jupyter Lab Authentication for Emacs-IPython-Notebook

In my earlier post, I mentioned how to run Apache Spark in a container with Jupyter notebook. While I like to use Jupyter notebook to document my work and share it with my colleagues, I still prefer to use Emacs instead of a web browser to write code. The answer is EIN — Emacs IPython Notebook. Installing EIN is straight forward. The tricky part is to make it working with the containerized Jupyter.

Once you enter EIN, you will need to use the command “ein:login” to connect to Jupyter. Internally it goes through websocket and if you just use your password, as you would from a browser, EIN will throw an error of expired websocket and you will not be able to execute any code or create a new notebook. One fix of this problem is to use the Jupyter token as the password. The token can be found from the command below:

host$ docker exec spark-jupyter jupyter server list
Currently running servers:
http://1e2480237424:8888/?token=4899803e93c22739a8de56fa4deed22aef6568f93025c901 :: /home/jovyan

Jupyter can use both token and password for user authentication based on how it is configured. By default, token changes every time, which makes it more secure but also harder to use. In a secured environment, we can fix the token by define the JUPYTER_TOKEN environment (first line below) and pass it to the Docker container when starting Jupyter (second line):

export JUPYTER_TOKEN="4899803e93c22739a8de56fa4deed22aef6568f93025c901"

host$ docker run --name spark -d -p 8888:8888 -p 4040:4040 -p 4041:4041 -e JUPYTER_TOKEN=$JUPYTER_TOKEN -v $PWD:/home/jovyan --name spark-jupyter jupyter/all-spark-notebook

A better configuration is to run the “jupyter server password” command (new in Jupyter version 5.0 ) in the container, which will save a hashed password in /home/jovyan/.ipython/jupyter_server_config.json. Then you will only need to put the same password when login. Though you can also disable both password and token, I would recommend not to do it.

To enable inline image display in EIN/Emacs, just put this line in your .emacs file:

(setq ein:output-area-inlined-images t)

I have been enjoying using Magit in Emacs to do all the git related stuff and run into an error when tagging a release. The error message is

git … tag --annotate --sign -m my_msg
error: gpg failed to sign the data
error: unable to sign the tag

This turned out to be caused by the fact that I have not set up gpg signing and signature. Below is how the problem is fixed and from now on all my git commits are going to be signed.

$ gpg --gen-key

There were a few dialogues between these commands, e.g. asking for names, e-mail, secret key, and it is recommended that you type random keys after these questions so that when gpg generate randoms there is more entropy. In the end, you will see some text with a line like this:

gpg: key 404NOTMYREALKEYID marked as ultimately trusted

This string “404NOTMYREALKEYID” is the key id. The same key id also shows up in the output of the following command:

$ gpg --list-secret-keys --keyid-format LONG
.....
---------------------------
sec   rsa3072/404NOTMYREALKEYID ......

Finally, just registering this key id with git. And the problem is solved. So the problem is not in Magit, but my configuration, since Magit uses the “–sign” option when it calls Git, which is actually a good practice.

$ git config --global commit.gpgsign true
$ git config --global user.signingkey 404NOTMYREALKEYID