How to run Jupyter Notebooks on remote server — SSH
Sometimes you want to run your code on a remote server. Sometimes your code is in the form of a jupyter notebook. But how do you run a jupyter notebook on a remote server and access the results in your local browser?
In this post, I will demonstrate how easy it is to accomplish this.
In short, there are two ways to access Jupyter Notebooks running on remote server —
- Using SSH Tunneling
- Using Reverse Proxy
Now, if you’ve never heard of either of these, it is fine. That’s what this post is for!
Today, we are going to look at the former method. Using SSH is the recommended method since it is more secure and easier to setup. In some niche cases, you might have to go for the latter method. We will see that in another post.
Access Server using SSH
As you may or may not know, when you connect to your remote server and you get the shell access, it is done through ssh. There are two ways general ways to authenticate with the remote server —
- Using password
- Using Pub/Priv Keys
Suppose you have a system on a local or remote network with IP xx.xx.xx.xx and you want to connect to it using ssh, the way you do it depends on whether you’re on windows or unix system.
On Unix, you might do something like ssh username@xx.xx.xx.xx and then you have to enter a password (password authentication) or you use your private key (which is the more secure method)
On Windows, you probably use PuTTY and there you have one of the two authentication methods setup.
The authentication method is irrelevant. As long as you can connect to your system using SSH, you can run the jupyter notebook there and access it remotely. How? By using SSH Tunneling.
What is SSH Tunneling?
This is also known as port forwarding. What this means is that you setup a network tunnel (a connection for data to flow) from a local point to remote point.
Example: ssh username@xx.xx.xx.xx -NL 1234:localhost:1234 (for Unix)
Look at the above example, 1234:localhost:1234 is the important part. What does it mean? It means that any network request you send to port 1234 in your current system will be automatically forwarded to localhost:1234 from the remote system.
You might have gotten some inkling on how it is possible to use SSH tunneling to access jupyter notebook from the above diagram. Let’s make it clear.
Access Jupyter Notebook
Whenever you start jupyter notebook, you can access it by going to localhost:8888 in your browser. But that works because the jupyter is running on your localhost . What about when the jupyter is running on someone else’s (remote server’s) localhost .
So what you need is a way to connect to the remote server’s localhostfrom your local computer. That’s where SSH Tunneling comes into play.
Suppose your server’s IP is 172.26.36.128 as an example. You get shell access to your server using ssh (using any of your preferred method). Then you start the jupyter notebook —
jupyter notebook --no-browser --port 1234This will start the jupyter notebook on port 1234 . You will also get a URL with authentication token —
http://localhost:8888/?token=8d186032bbbe095b294789e863b065a546fcc15b68683c99- On Unix
To start SSH tunneling on unix, open your terminal and enter the following command —
ssh -NL 1234:localhost:1234 username@172.26.36.128ssh -NL 1234:localhost:1234 -i /path/to/private_key - On Windows
You want to use PuTTY to start the SSH Tunnel, you can do it as follows —
Now just open up your favorite browser and go to URL you got before and you will see the Jupyter Notebook running in your browser while the code in the notebook is executed on the remote server. That’s all!
Conclusion
This is how you access jupyter notebook from a remote server. Some additional things you can do is run the SSH Tunnel command and Jupyter notebook command in the background. So you can have a jupyter notebook perpetually running on some dedicated port.
The above method should satisfy the requirements of most people. But what if you want to access jupyter notebook without setting up any SSH Tunnel. You want to connect to it over the normal internet. In that case, you can setup a reverse proxy to access the jupyter notebook through a HTTP server on your remote machine. That method’s for another post :)
Stay tuned for next post!
Thank you for reading!
