the default authenticator is PAMAuthenticator.
PAMAuthenticator means it uses the account in the linux system.

suposed you have an account in your linux named "Robert", and the password is "123456"
just use the "Robert" for username, and "123456" for password.

in short words, use the account you login in you linux system!!!!

JupyterHub doesn't itself allow creation of user accounts. That's generally handled by the outside system that the Hub uses for authentication, such as PAM (system users) or GitHub, etc.

JupyterHub's only sense of users is a whitelist of users you want to allow access to your Hub, in case you only want a subset of the users in your authentication service to have access to your Hub (e.g. you don't want to grant all GitHub users access to your Hub). For this, you use the c.Authenticator.whitelist configurable in jupyterhub_config.py:

c.Authenticator.whitelist = {'me', 'you', 'other'}

Hi @kiwi0217,

I hope @minrk's response helped you. As a beginner, you may find the Zero to JupyterHub guide helpful too.

how about I run jupyterhub in docker caontainners, then what is my pam account?
@zsluedem

@ShannonLS I am not sure. It depends on how you build the image. If you use the official docker image, you can check here. The user is nobody, maybe the password is blank

Where can I find this jupyterhub_config.py file?

you need to run the command jupyterhub --generate-config

how about I run jupyterhub in docker containers, then what is my pam account?
@zsluedem

I have the same problem. I want to use Linux users but jupyterhub is running inside a docker container. Can anyone suggest a solution please? thanks

Open a second console and run
docker container ls
to see the existing containers and their ids. Then run
docker exec -it $containerid$ bash
To show a bash console. (First few characters of the id of the jupyterhub container are enough to identify it)
In order to create a new linux user:

useradd $username$
passwd $username$

Then you will be asked for the password.

In addition, run following command within the container:

pip install notebook

Otherwise Spawning server does not work, also see:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56441563/jupyterhub-spawn-error-first-installation

Afterwards you are able to login with the just created login credentials.

I am trying to add a new user and a new admin by c.Authenticator.allowed_users = {'user1'} and c.Authenticator.admin_users = {'user1'} respectively. I comment out this 2 lines from the jupyterhub_config.pyfile too. But sill I am getting "Invalid username or password ". Regarding the password, I think for the first time "user1" will generate the password. Is it right?