Server kernels are all named "Python 3", can't tell which notebook they belong to

[jdanbrown]

Feature: Notebook Editor, Interactive Window, Python Editor cells

Description

• I like using a jupyter server to manage my kernels externally so that they can outlive vscode restarts, and also so they can run on remote machines
• However, when I need to reconnect to an existing kernel managed by an external jupyter server, I don't have enough information to figure out which notebook was using which kernel, because all of the kernels have the same name, e.g. "Python 3"
• This makes server kernels unusable (unless the user only uses one notebook at a time)
• Server kernels should be named in some informative way to avoid this, e.g. naming them after the notebook path/filename that started them

Selecting a local kernel — good	Selecting a server kernel — impossible :(

Microsoft Data Science for VS Code Engineering Team: @rchiodo, @IanMatthewHuff, @DavidKutu, @DonJayamanne, @greazer

[rchiodo]

Unfortunately I don't believe we have any information about what notebook is being used for a kernel. We only have the last activity time. You can see the data we get on this call here:

http://petstore.swagger.io/?url=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jupyter/notebook/master/notebook/services/api/api.yaml#/kernels/get_api_kernels

[rchiodo]

This would require a change to jupyter I believe to indicate what notebooks are currently using a kernel.

[jdanbrown]

What about using /api/sessions instead of /api/kernels? It includes a notebook.path field that atom/hydrogen uses to display which kernel was started by which notebook.

$ http localhost:8889/api/sessions
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 365
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2020 23:57:49 GMT
Etag: "0f45a05372a936d532e5359006055785d4691fdb"
Server: TornadoServer/4.5.3
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff

[
    {
        "id": "f55db7d0-3754-4409-bdc0-c21687056a0f",
        "kernel": {
            "connections": 1,
            "execution_state": "idle",
            "id": "e8ab37b7-fdbf-4cf3-bd26-3e0c6cac0580",
            "last_activity": "2020-03-12T23:31:51.724382Z",
            "name": "python3"
        },
        "notebook": {
            "path": "/path/to/notebook.ipynb-36852600-affa-4621-9be4-13895db8e998"
        }
    }
]

[rchiodo]

That might work, worth a try.

[IanMatthewHuff]

Validated, now shows the active notebook path.