Zero-to-jupyterhub-k8s: Document how to customize images/branding in a JupyterHub

[choldgraf]

At the team meeting @betatim mentioned that he'd be willing to discuss how to modify branding etc in a JupyterHub deployment. We'll sit down sometime this week to document how to do this in z2jh.

[betatim]

To modify the look&feel you need to modify things in at least two places:

• pages served by JupyterHub are customised in the hub config and container
• pages served by the single user notebook server need to be customised in the single user container/image

An example of modifying the hub image

FROM jupyterhub/k8s-hub:v0.6

USER root
COPY templates/error.html /usr/local/share/jupyter/hub/templates/error.html
COPY templates/my-logo.png /usr/local/share/jupyter/hub/static/images/my-logo.png

USER ${NB_USER}

This will give you a custom error page and a new logo. To actually use the logo you need to configure the hub. Below I just put it in the extraConfig, check if this can be done via a chart config option as well:

hub:
  extraConfig: |
    c.JupyterHub.logo_file = '/usr/local/share/jupyter/hub/static/images/my-logo.png'

I don't have an example handy for configuring the looks of a classic notebook. For JupyterLab you need to make a new theme. Need to think how we can make some short and complete example for this.

[betatim]

We might want to think about these kind of "pull stuff directly into an image" approaches https://github.com/jupyterhub/jupyterhub/issues/1927#issue-327065043. Not sure what I think of them yet

[mjuric]

A quick question: I tried to customize the hub image and override it in config.yaml by setting:

jupyterhub:
  hub:
    image:
      name: mjuric/k8s-hub-dirac
      tag: 0.8.2-mjuric1

But after running helm upgrade, it's still picking up the jupyterhub/k8s-hub:0.8.2 image. Can you tell if there's something obviously wrong that I'm doing?

[mjuric]

Figured it out (h/t to @stevenstetzler) -- the hub section should be top-level, not under jupiterhub. Leaving it up there in case someone else has the same problem!

[consideRatio]

This issue relates to https://github.com/jupyterhub/zero-to-jupyterhub-k8s/issues/691, my recommended path is to mount templates and files, like described under option 3 in that issue.

I'm closing this and summarizing our wish to have this kind of docs in another issue.