Live Collaboration¶

The collaboration mode in Jupyter allows you to share your session to code together with (e.g.) colleagues. Collaboration mode is supported as of Carto-Lab Docker version 0.24.1. Collaborative mode in Carto-Lab is opt-in and must be enabled with the flag COLLABORATIVE=true in your Docker .env.

Note

The latest Jupyter Real Time Collaboration (RTC) is incompatible with the Jupytext extension. Before several issues are fixed, disabling collaboration mode is not enough. It needs to be uninstalled. Carto-Lab Docker will uninstall jupytext if either COLLABORATIVE is set to true or DISABLE_JUPYTEXT is true.

See the configuration section.

Authentication¶

The common use case for live collaboration is in shared Jupyter sessions. If you are serving a single-user Jupyter Lab server under a static domain or on localhost, a token can be shared with guests. The token should be regularly updated. Carto-Lab will generate a random token on startup if GENERATE_TOKEN=true is set.

Warning

In general, and from a security perspective, it is always better to handle authentication with a dedicated IdentityProvider such as Keycloak.

Enable token generation with:

GENERATE_TOKEN=true

Start the server afterwards and print your current token in a terminal session:

echo $TOKEN

You can also click the share button on the upper-right and share links to notebooks (including the token):

Afterwards, you can share links with the token (e.g.) with colleagues:

http://localhost:8888/?token=...
# or
https://myserver.example.com/?token=...