[STRUDEL] New sharing-friendly workshop hub set up

[aprilmj]

Context

STRUDEL would like a workshop-like hub set up that enables easy sharing, including (potentially) direct sharing from their website.

Following is input from STRUDEL to determine what the hub needs will be.

• Resolve problems with the docker build step in the GitHub Action for the strudel-infra
• User auth with github from the hub
• Resolve problems with Cline extension/versioning (which may overlap with added jc-test hub #1 and [STRUDEL] Enable AI coding extensions #6618
• Configure with appropriate resources and (if appropriate) pre-warm ahead of the workshop - note that we expect 50ish users to all start at once
• When you open the strudel nbgitpuller link, after logging in, it will first send you to an intermediary page where you must select the specs of your machine and which program to run (QGIS, VSCode, etc.). Would it be possible to have a link that skips this step by defaulting to VSCode and a reasonable set of machine specs?
• When you spin up the code, it would be handy if it automatically ran the npm install and npm start commands in the terminal so that the user doesn't have to run any commands to get started. Would that be possible to include in the launch process?

What we need to do

Options we discussed, none with persistent storage (which is ideal for containing costs when you share widely):
- Shared password, no-authentication (what 2i2c tends to think of as a "workshop hub")
- URL with a shareable image - like https://spyglass.hhmi.2i2c.cloud/

Definition of Done

• STRUDEL team discusses and agrees what direction they want to take with this hub
• We refine this issue to cover the hub setup and deployment
• Check in with STRUDEL to ensure they're ready for their workshop ahead of October 23
• Hub is successfully deployed & communicated

[aprilmj]

@yuvipanda when you get back from leave, will you help further refine this issue so it's 100% ready to work this month?

[aprilmj]

The next event is October 23 & the STRUDEL team would like to check in and get some advice/enablement a couple of times in the coming sprint.

Notes from email conversations -

• The Cline extension has stopped working for me. It appears to install but stays stuck on the loading screen indefinitely. This may be due to the version of code-server we are using but I'm not able to upgrade because of number 2. (AJ note - this is more directly related to [STRUDEL] Enable AI coding extensions #6618)

• The docker build step in the GitHub Action for the strudel-infra repo is failing. There appears to be a MODULE_NOT_FOUND issue when the vscode extensions are being installed.

• I'm not sure how users can authenticate with github from the hub. I plan to set things up so that each participant will have their own repo in the strudel-workshops organization and have permission to push to their repo. They will each have a unique link to the hub so that it pulls from their respective repo on startup. The problem is when they finally commit and push their changes from the hub, they need to authenticate with GitHub. This may be possible to do with the github cli but I haven't tested that out.

[agoose77]

We've refined this as a 2, and we need to time box it as such.

[agoose77]

Here's an unrefined dump of my short-hand. I'll pull out some useful text tomorrow:

• what is identity of gh-scoped-creds -- can we impersonate GitHub accounts?
  • is this suitable?
• A: create gh app and look into whether it can be org wide
• version of cline installed
  • install at user-pod time, so version is changing.
  • was working august onwards
• we would prefer a new version of cline
  • upgrade code-server to match
• prior comms are lower priority for now
• perf issues / behaviour?
  • 30 people using hub concurrently?
  • issues with people using same username?
  • A: send form
  • A: setup range of profiles
• Another test on thursday
• A: gh auth exploration.

[agoose77]

I've created these PRs which fixes their CI (and pulls in cline) for me:

• fix: use latest vscode strudel-science/strudel-infra#15
• [strudel, *] Enable latest image for strudel #6913

[agoose77]

This is blocked on the question of GitHub Authentication and/or using gh-scoped-creds. I've started a thread on Slack.

I don't think we can as-yet skip the profile screen. We need 2i2c-org/jupyterhub-fancy-profiles#132

There's no easy way to do this in one link manually either -- whilst we can POST form options, we can't do that in a way that will handle the case that the user isn't already logged in.

[agoose77]

Regarding running npm build after startup, that's not trivial to do if the entrypoint is nbgitpuller via the server-extension. There are no lifecycle hooks to run code after the git-pull. But, I think we'd easily be able to do this using initContainers. It depends upon whether the template is always the same one being pulled. I'm pretty sure it's not. We can clarify this for the next meeting, and not block on that question now.

[rtmiz]

@agoose77 if 2i2c-org/jupyterhub-fancy-profiles#132 does get merged (or even if it doesn't) you can find a solution to the not-logged-in-problem in the same PR.

I posted a code snippet which handles login with chained redirects.

[agoose77]

I've bumped this to a five — we've had two meetings to refine this, and I've learned some more about our stack nuances around Git and GitHub auth.