Jiffylab multiuser IPython notebooks

jiffylab is a very interesting project by Preston Holmes to provide sandboxed IPython notebooks instances on a server using docker. There are several user cases, for example:

In a tutorial about python, give users instant access to a working IPython notebook
In a tutorial about some specific python package, give users instant access to a python environment with that package already installed
Give students in a research group access to python on a server with preinstalled several packages maintained and updated by an expert user.

How to install jiffylab on Ubuntu 12.04

Install docker on Ubuntu Precise
Copy-paste each line of linux-setup.sh to a terminal, to check what is going on step by step
To start the application, change user to jiffylabweb:

sudo su jiffylabweb
cd /usr/local/etc/jiffylab/webapp/
python app.py #run in debug mode

Point your browser to the server to check debugging messages, if any.
Finally start the application in production mode:

python server.py #run in production mode

How `jiffylab` works

Each users gets a sandboxed IPython notebook instance, the user can save the notebooks and reconnect to the same session later. Main things missing:

No real authentication system / no HTTPS connection, easy workaround would be to allow access only from local network/VPN/SSH tunnel
No scientific packages preinstalled, need to customize the docker image to have numpy, matplotlib, pandas...
No access to common filesystem, read-only, this I think is the most pressing feature missing, issue already on Github

I think that just adding the common filesystem would be enough to make the project already usable to provide students a way to easily get started with python.