PAWS/News/2018-06-21

PAWS gets a major upgrade and a logo!

PAWS (PAWS: A Web Shell) is our Wikimedia Cloud Services-hosted JupyterHub deployment. Through PAWS, any Wikimedia user can run their own server, use the nice web interface from Jupyter notebooks, and write scripts in a few programming languages (currently Python, Bash and R). It is also possible to get a more traditional command line interface and interact with the server through terminals in the browser.

After a few months of preparation and testing by the nice JupyterHub community, we now have a major upgrade for PAWS that fixes some bugs and should provide better stability to users. Beyond upgrading to the newest version of JupyterHub (0.9), this release also includes several improvements to PAWS configuration (pull-request). To commemorate this upgrade, PAWS is getting its own logo! PAWS.svg was created by Barquill0 in a Google Code-in-2017 task and was recently chosen as the symbol for this project.

PAWS is actively looking for interested volunteers to help with making it more useful to the community. We have tasks for all skill levels and hope to bring some major new features soon. You can start helping by giving input in the open tasks in the Phabricator project.