JupyterLab-server-proxy GUI Launchers in Notebooks area

[psychemedia]

The jupyterlab-launcher-extension GUI places icons in an area marked "Notebooks" even though services may not be notebook related e.g. RStudio.

Would it make sense to have allow these icons to be registered in the Other area or a newly minted Service Launches area? Or rename Notebooks something like Notebooks and Applications?

But then, what if you launched a service that was headless, eg a database service with no UI?

It also strikes me that some applications you would only want to start once, although you may want to to close and reopen a window onto them repeatedly without starting and stopping the underlying application each time. This contrasts with a notebook launcher, where you presumably do want to start a new notebook process on each start.

Arising from this, a couple more observations:

• The notebook UI Running tab lists terminals and notebook started from the launched but not other running services started from the notebook or JupyterLab launcher;
• Where a service has a JupyterLab GUI icon, and the service is launched once and once only (e.g. RStudio) would it make sense to allow for a two icons, one for 'not running' and the other for 'running'. This would act as an indicator in the JupyterLab context as to whether a service launched from JupyterLab is running or not. (This could be useful e.g. in the case of a service such as a database server started from the JupyterLab UI.)

[yuvipanda]

The specific reason they are currently in 'Notebooks' is:

. That's the only way to use the empty space at the top of the launcher - otherwise you have to scroll all the way down to see it

. https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab/issues/5822

You can turn off the launcher completely by setting launcher_entry.enabled = False in your config. This might be useful for things without a GUI? We can also add more keys there to configure more things.

[psychemedia]

@yuvipanda In order to configure lab launcher icons, should you be able to pass a complete set of setup arguments?

Eg riffing on your docs example:

import os

def setup_openrefine():
  path = os.path.join(os.environ['HOME'], 'openrefine')
  return {
    'command': ['/home/jovyan/openrefine-2.8/refine', '-p', '{port}','-d',path],
    'port': 3333,
    'launcher_entry': {
        'enabled': True,
        'icon_path': '/home/jovyan/.jupyter/open-refine-logo.svg',
        'title': 'OpenRefine',
    },
  }

I did a quick test and the icon doesn't seem to get picked up in the lab launcher?

[UPDATE: my mistake - I'd disabled thejupyter labextension install jupyterlab-server-proxy step because of a jupyterlab version conflict. Updating Juptyerlab and installing the labextension fixed things.]