Hello!

tl;dr: We'd like to turn off Jupyter+Virtualenv (SWAP) in favor of Jupyter+Conda (Newpyter) the week of May 3rd. Please help us test and switch before then.

Over the last year, we've slowly been working on a replacement of the current virtualenv based JupyterHub system (formerly known as SWAP) with a new one based on Conda (AKA Newpyter). Everything should be in place to switch and decommission the virtualenv based system you all are used to. Before we do...we have to make sure you all use and are ok with the new setup!

We'd like to decommission Jupyter+Virtualenv (running on port 8000) the week of May 3rd. In the meantime, please switch to Jupyter+Conda on port 8880. The documentation has been updated.

Summary of the changes:

You will ssh tunnel to port 8880 instead of port 8000.
Your Notebook files will remain unchanged.
Your local data files will remain unchanged.
Your Python environment will change, so you may need to re-install packages. See docs here and here.
PySpark, Scala Spark and Spark SQL and Spark-R kernels will be removed. If you use the PySpark kernels currently, please port them to a regular Python kernel using wmfdata-python to launch your SparkSession. Docs here.

Please reach out with any questions, and report issues on this ticket. If we encounter any blockers along the way, we will postpone the May 3rd deadline.

Thank you!

- Andrew Otto + Data Engineering