Feature request: Open notebooks from a server

[moorepants]

I just watched the spyder talk at SciPy and really liked this plugin. I think my students would prefer this over the JupyterHub interface and it would be nice if a user could open Spyder locally and then open notebooks from a server (like jupyterhub). This would allow me to manage the software installed on the server, accept their assigments, etc, and then they can use spyder.

[ccordoba12]

Hey Jason, thanks for your question at my talk and for your request.

We could make our plugin work with Jupyterhub if it provides a REST API to authenticate users. However, as I said when I answered your question, there would be some limitations:

1. Users wouldn't be able to use Spyder Variable Explorer for now. However, we plan to change that in Spyder 4 by moving our code for Spyder kernels to an external package, so that it can be installed independently of Spyder and selected through the notebook interface.
2. The Save as operation (i.e. moving and/or renaming) would be reduced to simply renaming because from the Spyder side we don't have a view of the remote filesystem to handle moves.
3. The Open operation would be deactivated because of the same reason.

Do you think that would be ok for your students?

[moorepants]

Possibly. I'm sure we could do away with the variable explorer. Sounds like the save/open stuff might be confusing to the students. It isn't clear to me how you'd open or save things then? Would you use the jupyter menu instead?

[ccordoba12]

It isn't clear to me how you'd open or save things then?

Ok, how about this: I think we can ask the notebook server (through REST calls) about the filesystem behind it. So with that info we could build a Qt treewidget to represent a filesystem view that will allow users to open/save notebooks in the server.

Would you use the jupyter menu instead?

Trying to use any of the Jupyter menu actions will open the notebook in your web browser right now. So that takes users out of Spyder, which makes no sense for the integration we want to have through this plugin.

[pjk645-zz]

Several of my colleagues would probably switch to spyder if they could connect their notebooks to our clusters from within spyder. Personally, I prefer using the functionality with the console connected to our cluster, but people like their jupyter notebooks. ¯_(ツ)_/¯