JupyterHub Internal Server Error on GVL server start - with solution

Support Requests
#1

Hi,

I’ve been having problems with Jupyterhub on both group and user servers. Although the server starts, and the main login page appears for Jupyterhub, attempting to log in with user researcher and the cluster password produces an error:

500 : Internal Server Error
Spawner failed to start [status=1]

I tracked this down via /var/log/upstart/jupyterhub.log to this issue:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/jupyterhub-singleuser", line 297, in <module>
    main()
[…]
  File "/usr/local/bin/jupyterhub-singleuser", line 239, in _static_custom_path_default
    path = super(SingleUserNotebookApp, self)._static_custom_path_default()
AttributeError: 'super' object has no attribute '_static_custom_path_default'

which is an incompatibility between older versions of Jupyterhub and the newer Notebook, covered in these GitHub issues:

A solution that worked for me is to log in via SSH as ubuntu, and issue:

sudo pip install --upgrade jupyterhub

Revisiting the login page (without a restart!) then enables logging in to Jupyterhub as researcher with the cluster password.

3 Likes
#2

That’s great - thanks!

We figured this out when we were playing with Jupyter the other week, but hadn’t documented it anywhere (of course).

Thanks for providing the solution alongside the report.

2 Likes
#3

Thanks for the heads up and fix. I’m writing a fix into the installer script now.

Simon.

1 Like