[ENH] - /home/jovyan/work is confusing (documentation)

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What docker image(s) is this feature applicable to?

scipy-notebook

What change(s) are you proposing?

User Guide documentation suggests mounting a local directory ($PWD, etc.) to /home/jovyan/work to persist notebooks. An excellent suggestion, let's keep our data around.

But at no point in Quick Start, Selecting an Image, Running a Container, or Common Features does the documentation instruct you that by default, the notebook will save to /home/jovyan.

How does this affect the user?

The user will discover that their data didn't persist only upon running a new container.

Further, there's no immediately available troubleshooting topic or search query that will illuminate that you didn't click "work" in the left sidebar of jupyter-server. The natural inclination is to click the large, friendly Python logo to get a Python notebook, since after all, that's why your here.

But that notebook ends up in /home/jovyan.

Anything else?

I was running:

docker run --rm --name=jupyter \
  -p 8888:8888 -v $(pwd):/home/jovyan/work \
  -e RESTARTABLE=yes \
  jupyter/scipy-notebook:python-3.11.4 "$@"

I'm using jupyter for instructional purposes. My resolution is to mount $PWD to /home/jovyan (without the work folder) and accept that I end up with extra files on the host from jovyan's $HOME (which I presume could be an issue when selecting another image at a later date). Not a problem, since I'm primarily concerned with making sure I don't lose any .ipynb files.

[4kbyte]

That "$@", by the way, is because I put the command in a file called start.sh, so that I could pass arguments to jupyter-server with sh start.sh ARGUMENT....

[4kbyte]

docker run --rm --name=jupyter \
  -p 8888:8888 -v "${PWD}":/home/jovyan/work \
  jupyter/scipy-notebook:python-3.11.4 \
    start-notebook.sh --ServerApp.root_dir=/home/jovyan/work