How to change the default thebelab template to use one which run a local Jupyter kernel ?

[NIDS2020-instructor]

Hi,

The Jupyter book seems like a fantastic project, and I would like to use it to run on a local VM (each student is using her/his own VM). I would be very interested in suggestions on which parameters to change for this use. To start with, i identified two things which would be very useful.

The first thing is to change the way thebelab is used so that it connects to a locally running kernel. Thanks to this git issue, i found out that the thebelab script needed in all html pages is:

<script type="text/x-thebe-config">
  {
    bootstrap:{{ site.thebe_bootstrap }},
    kernelOptions: {
      name: "python3",
      serverSettings: {
        "baseUrl": "{{ site.kernel_url }}",
        "token": "{{ site.kernel_token }}"
      }
    },
  }
</script>

However i do not know how i should configure my project so that:

• the default thebelab script is changed to the one above in all html pages
• where and how to set the kernel_url and kernel_token parameters
• how to create myself (to then follow up with a PR if useful) a parameter kernel_name so that not to have python3 hardcoded

The second thing which would be very useful, is to remedy the issue of not having any of the great autocompletion features, etc. available in Jupyter notebooks when using thebelab, by also having the choice to open the Jupyter notebook of the current page in a new tab. So what one should do if a local kernel is running (and working fine with thebelab as detailed above) to also have the option to run a classic Jupyter Notebook in a new tab using the locally running kernel if the student would like all the nice features offered by notebook when editing code ?

Any help on these two aspects would be very welcome.

Please note that after writing this post, i also created an issue here as i am not sure where this post belongs.