[FIXED] Set Jupyter Notebook password in bash script through environment variable

Issue

I have come across the following code in a bash script for automatic deployment and setup of Jupyter Notebook. There are issues when the password contains a #, as the rest of the line is treated as a comment (and probably raises an exception in Python due to lack of closing bracket):

# Set up Jupyter Notebook with the same password
su - $USERNAME -c "$SHELL +x" << EOF
  mkdir -p ~/.jupyter
  python3 -c "from notebook.auth.security import set_password; set_password(password=\"$PASSWORD\")"
EOF

Obviously this is not an ideal way to set a password due to the above issues.

I am wondering what best practice would be in this situation? Using triple-quotes instead of single enclosing quotes might be better, but still runs into issues if the supplied password has triple quotes. How is this situation normally tackled?

Solution

Instead of passing the password through a bash here-document, just use python to read it from the environment:

# Set up Jupyter Notebook with the same password
su - $USERNAME -c "$SHELL +x" << EOF
  mkdir -p ~/.jupyter
  python3 -c "from notebook.auth.security import set_password; import os; set_password(password=os.environ['PASSWORD'])"
EOF

Answered By - Ian Hinder