I am trying to configure and understnad how the most common Jupyter authenticators work. However, I am having trouble understanding how LocalAuthenticator works and how it differs from PAMAuthenticator. The Jupyter documentation states the following: The LocalAuthenticator is a special kind of authenticator that has the ability to manage users on the local system.. Given that I am running everything locally, on my laptop, my uderstading is that I can use the same credentials I use to login to my Linux user. However this doesn't work. The JupyterHub server gives the following message: Failed login for <user>.
My JupyterHub configuration file only contains the following line:
c.JupyterHub.authenticator_class = 'jupyterhub.auth.LocalAuthenticator'.
If I change the above line to:
c.JupyterHub.authenticator_class = 'jupyterhub.auth.PAMAuthenticator'
then everything works just fine and the login is succesfull.
Can someone explain me the differences of the two authenticators and why the LocalAuthenticator does not work in my case? The only difference I am aware of is that (according to the documentation) the LocalAuthenticator creates new users if they don't exist. However, after setting c.LocalAuthenticator.create_system_users = True and trying to login with a non-existent user, no new user is created.
Thank you.
PS: My OS is Debian Testing and I have installed JupyterHub using the instructions provided on its GitHub page.
