Exposing Multiple Services Via a Single http Port Using Jupyter nbserverproxy

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been circling, but failing to make much actual progress on using, OpenStack as a platform for making self-serve OU hosted VMs available to students. (I’m increasingly starting to think this is not sensible, but I’m struggling to find someone I can chat to about it… OpenStack is too enterprise, like a heavy “Java” thing where I need a just works “Python” thing…).

Anyway.

One of the issues with the OU Faculty OpenStack setup is the way the security model locks everything down. Not only is no API access available, there is also a limit on IP address allocation and open ports are limited to port 80 (and maybe port 22? Or maybe not.)

For the TM351 VM – which is what we’re looking to put onto OU OpenStack – we have been exposing services on at least two http ports, one for the Jupyter notebooks and one for OpenRefine. (The latest build also has a simple VM webserver, and I’m experimenting with a notebook search engine. Optionally, we have also allowed students to open up ports to the PostgreSQL and MongoDB services.)

If I do find a sensible way to get the VM running on OpenStack, finding a way to shove all the http services through port 80 looks like a necessary requirement. Previously, I’d noticed that @betatim’s openrefineder demo made use of a proxy to expose the OpenRefine service via the Jupyter notebook port, and looking at it again today I noticed that the nbopenrefineproxy package it was using is available as a Jupyterhub project package: jupyterhub/nbserverproxy.

In the current TM351 VM set-up, we have the following:

• Jupyter notebook on guest port 8888, host port 35180
• OpenRefine on guest port 3334, host port 35181

However, if I install and enable nbserverproxy, and restart the Jupyter notebook server, I can now find OpenRefine proxied as http://localhost:35180/proxy/3334/ as well as on http://localhost:35181.

One gotcha to note is that the OpenRefine page doesn’t render properly from that URL without the trailing slash because the OpenRefine HTML includes relative links to assets:

...
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="externals/select2/select2.css" />
 <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="externals/tablesorter/theme.blue.css" />
...

which resolve as e.g. http://localhost:35180/proxy/externals/select2/select2.css (404).

However, with the trailing slash, the links do resolve correctly (e.g. as http://localhost:35180/proxy/3334/externals/select2/select2.css) when the trailing slash is added.

Handy… and the way to go if we do get this running on OpenStack.

PS if you know of a baby steps tutorial that shows how I can build a custom VM image on a Mac that I can upload to OpenStack, please let me know via the comments. Or otherwise get in touch if you can talk me through the various approaches.