How can the terminal in Jupyter automatically run bash instead of sh

Question

I love the terminal feature and works very well for our use case where I would like students to do some work directly from a terminal so they experience that environment. The shell that launches automatically is sh and does not pick up all of my bash defaults. I can type "bash" and everything works perfectly. How can I make "bash" the default?

Answer 1

Jupyter uses the environment variable $SHELL to decide which shell to launch. If you are running jupyter using init then this will be set to dash on Ubuntu systems. My solution is to export SHELL=/bin/bash in the script that launches jupyter.

Answer 2

I have tried the ultimate way of switching system-wide SHELL environment variable by adding the following line to the file /etc/environment:

    SHELL=/bin/bash 

This works on Ubuntu environment. Every now and then, the SHELL variable always points to /bin/bash instead of /bin/sh in Terminal after a reboot.

Also, setting up CRON job to launch jupyter notebook at system startup triggered the same issue on jupyter notebook's Terminal.

It turns out that I need to include variable setting and sourcing statements for Bash init file like ~/.bashrc in CRON job statement as follows via the command $ crontab -e :

    @reboot source /home/USERNAME/.bashrc && \             export SHELL=/bin/bash && \             /SOMEWHERE/jupyter notebook --port=8888 

In this way, I can log in the Ubuntu server via a remote web browser (http://server-ip-address:8888/) with opening jupyter notebook's Terminal default to Bash as same as local environment.