Create a virtual environment for JupyterHub

Please follow the following steps to create a virtual environment for JupyterHub on the TEACH cluster. The instructions provided here show how to create just the base environment with Python 3.11. If you need additional packages, you have to install them yourself after creating the environment. If you need a custom environment with specific packages that can be preloaded in JupyterHUb dropdown menu, please submit a help ticket and we will create it for you.

Step1: Log into any of the login nodes of the CRCD clusters. For this example we will use login3 "htc.crc.pitt.edu".

ssh <your_pitt_username>@htc.crc.pitt.edu

Step2: Load the JupyterHub Conda module.

module load jupyterhub/hub.5.2.1

Step3: Test if you have conda command available.

conda --version

It should return something like conda 25.7.0.

Step4: Create a new conda environment. In this example we will create an environment named yk-teach-env with Python 3.11.

conda create -p  /path/to/your/env/yk-teach-env python=3.11 ipykernel jupyterlab

Replace /path/to/your/env/ with the actual path where you want to create the environment. You can choose any name for the environment, here we used yk-teach-env as an example, but please try to make it distinctive so that it can be easily identified in the JupyterHub dropdown menu. The ipykernel and jupyterlab packages are included to ensure that the environment can be used in JupyterHub, so please do not remove them.

Step5: Activate the newly created environment.

source activate /path/to/your/env/yk-teach-env

Step6: Install any additional packages you need in the environment. For example, if you need numpy and pandas, you can install them as follows:

conda install numpy pandas

You can install any other packages you need in the same way. If you need to install packages from PyPI, you can use

pip command as follows:

pip install <package_name>

Step7: You can now test your environment by using it in JupyterHub. As referred in the JupyterHub on the Teach Cluster documentation, you can use your environment in the Select Virtual Environment dropdown menu (the Provide custom path option) when starting a new JupyterHub session.

Step8: You can provide the path to your environment for students to use in the JupyterHub dropdown menu as follows:

/path/to/your/env/yk-teach-env