For a few years now we've been running hub.cl.cam.ac.uk, a Jupyterhub instance, for the first year course "Foundations of Computer Science". It serves as a hosting site for the lecture notes, which come in the form of Jupyter notebooks, and as a playground where students can try OCaml, and it also is used to run the assessed exercises that are a mandatory part of the course.
Since I spent some time setting it up back in 2018 or so, its aggregated some cruft over the years, and has also fallen somewhat behind the bleeding edge of the Jupyter software stack. So I thought this year, as I'm actually lecturing the course, I'd give it a bit of loving care and attention.
We were still on Jupyterhub 1.5.3 whereas the current release is 5.3.0 - so there was quite a bit of work to do. I brief play with putting things on the latest version seemed to break quite a lot of things, so I thought it might be better to go back to the drawing board and start the config again from scratch. So with some help from Claude, I've now managed to hugely simplify the whole config of Jupyterhub, and even given it a makeover to try to match the style of www.cst.cam.ac.uk as well. The improvements include:
As ever, this took longer than I'd anticipated, but I'm mostly there now. There are a few more steps to try: