Installation fails on a fresh 18.10 system (node 8.x has no release candidate)

[owah]

Hello community,

Im trying to install the littlest jupyterhub on a fresh Ubuntu Server 18.10 VM. At some point the installer aborts due to:

subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command '['apt-get', 'update', '--yes']' returned non-zero exit status 100.

When running apt-get update manually, I get:

Err:6 https://deb.nodesource.com/node_8.x cosmic Release                 
404  Not Found [IP: 54.230.129.120 443]
Reading package lists... Done                      
E: The repository 'https://deb.nodesource.com/node_8.x cosmic Release' does not have a Release file.
N: Updating from such a repository can't be done securely, and is therefore disabled by default.
N: See apt-secure(8) manpage for repository creation and user configuration details.

So I checked out https://deb.nodesource.com/node_8.x/dists/ and there is indeed no release file for cosmic, only for bionic. From node 10.x onwards, there are also cosmic release files.

I assume that this can be fixed by changing the installer to install a newer node version, but I am not sure how much of this project specifically depends on version 8.x, which is why I am not creating a pull request, but rather opening an issue, so that more experienced devs can weigh in on this.

[mgd722]

This still fails for me. Ubuntu 18.04, just updated node to latest, following the custom server install instructions.

[yuvipanda]

@mgd722 sorry to hear that! Can you provide a traceback or other error message you get?

[mgd722]

Sorry-- should've included that. When I run:
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jupyterhub/the-littlest-jupyterhub/master/bootstrap/bootstrap.py | sudo -E python3 - --admin mike

I get:

  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  3557  100  3557    0     0  30930      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 31201
Checking if TLJH is already installed...
Setting up hub environment
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 107, in <module>
  File "<stdin>", line 69, in main
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/subprocess.py", line 336, in check_output
    **kwargs).stdout
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/subprocess.py", line 418, in run
    output=stdout, stderr=stderr)
subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command '['apt-get', 'update', '--yes']' returned non-zero exit status 100.

Running Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS and node v11.10.0

[yuvipanda]

I apologize for the super extremely late response, @mgd722 :)

Do you still have the problem? Can you explain a bit more by what you mean by 'just updated node to latest, following the custom server install instructions.'? TLJH currently ships with v10.x of node, and that currently works. I think v11 isn't supported upstream either. Do you remember how / why you got to v11?

Once #337 lands it should be much easier to debug messages like these, since they'll actually have meaningful error messages!

[mgd722]

No worries-- I was able to get it working, but I don't remember how now. It was probably a node version issue, or just plain old user error somewhere along the way.

[yuvipanda]

Glad you got it working, @mgd722! If you encounter the issue in the future, please post here or (even better), create a topic in discourse.jupyter.org. Thank you :)