Remote Jupyter notebook locally over ssh gate

2-minute read
Software Development • Beginner
python • jupyter notebook • ssh • ssh config

Problem

I have encountered several times this problem:

Me: I want a nice interface to run python code in a remote machine.

Jupyter Notebook: I am here for you.

SSH Gate: I’ll make things trickier.

Well, here is the guide to setup a jupyter notebook server in a remote machine and connect to it, even if you need to pass through an ssh gate.

This guide is for UNIX-like systems and has been tested on Ubuntu 18.04.

Solution

Create an ssh config to login to your remote server in file .ssh/config

Host <host-machine>
  Hostname <remote hostname> #something like remotehost.com
  ProxyCommand ssh <gate-name>  -W %h:%p 
  User <username>
  LocalForward 18888 localhost:8888

Host <gate-machine>
  Hostname <sshgate hostname> 
  User <username>

You might need to set the configuration differently, depending on the settings of the server you want to connect to. This configuration basically tells the system:

To ssh into host-machine, you first need to ssh into gate-machine.

Also, expose port $8888$ of the host-machine to my machine on port $18888$.

Jupyter set up

  1. Having set up the configuration, connection to the remote machine is as easy as running the following command

ssh <host-name> # as set in the config

  1. To let it continue running, when you logout create a tmux session (Follow a tmux introduction for details. If you don’t know what tmux is and use the terminal, I am sure you will love it):

tmux new -s jupyter

You could also set it as a daemon, but I find the tmux method more versatile.

  1. Create a python virtual environment to install the jupyter server and all the libraries you need (See my virtual environments post for details).

mkvirtualenv myenv

  1. Install jupyter notebook/lab

pip install notebook

or

pip install jupyter-lab

  1. Run jupyter notebook/lab server

jupyter notebook --port 8888 #for jupyter notebook

or

jupyter lab --port 8888 #for jupyter lab

and copy the token shown on the terminal screen.

  1. Detach from the tmux session with CTRL+b, d

  2. Open a browser on your local machine and go to localhost:18888 as we set up the .ssh/config. Use the token and enjoy running notebooks in your personal version of Google Collab.