nbnovnc provides Jupyter server and notebook extensions to proxy a notebook-side VNC session using noVNC, enabling users to run non-web applications within their Jupyter notebook server. This is mostly useful for hosted Jupyter environments such as JupyterHub or Binder.

This is proof-of-concept. I'm working on 1) porting it to the latest jupyter-server-proxy and 2) use tigervnc and its UNIX socket support.

The extension requires nbserverproxy and currently uses an opinionated VNC environment comprised of TightVNC server, noVNC, supervisord, and websockify.

On Debian/Ubuntu:

apt install tightvncserver novnc websockify supervisor xinit

nbnovnc requires websockify version 0.8.0 for python2. There is a bug in websockify 0.8.0 under python3 which has since been addressed in websockify master. However, nbnovnc is not yet compatible with websockify master.

Install the library:

pip install nbnovnc

Either install the extensions for the user:

jupyter serverextension enable  --py nbnovnc
jupyter nbextension     install --py nbnovnc
jupyter nbextension     enable  --py nbnovnc

Or install the extensions for all users on the system:

jupyter serverextension enable  --py --sys-prefix nbnovnc
jupyter nbextension     install --py --sys-prefix nbnovnc
jupyter nbextension     enable  --py --sys-prefix nbnovnc

The following traitlets are available:

• NBNoVNC.geometry: The desktop geometry, e.g. 1024x768.
• NBNoVNC.depth: The color depth, e.g. 24.
• NBNoVNC.novnc_directory: The path to noVNC's web assets.
• NBNoVNC.vnc_command: The command to launch the VNC server. Contains replacement fields for display, depth, and geometry, e.g. xinit -- /usr/bin/Xtightvnc :{display} -geometry {geometry} -depth {depth}
• NBNoVNC.websockify_command = The websockify command. Contains replacement fields. e.g. websockify --web {novnc_directory} --heartbeat {heartbeat} {port} localhost:{vnc_port}

You can set these in a jupyter_notebook_config.py in one of the config paths from jupyter --paths. For example:

c.NBNoVNC.novnc_directory = "/usr/local/src/novnc"

You may configure the desktop environment by altering ~/.xinitrc. For example:

#!/bin/bash

. /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc

In a shared environment where one user may freely connect to the host running another user's VNC server, you should make sure that the VNC server authenticates connections. For example, in jupyter_notebook_config.py:

import os
rfb_auth_file = os.path.join(os.environ['HOME'], '.vnc', 'passwd')
c.NBNoVNC.vnc_command = "xinit -- /usr/bin/Xtightvnc :{display} -geometry {geometry} -depth {depth}" + " -rfbauth " + rfb_auth_file

This requires that the user sets a password via vncpasswd.