This is a guide for how to best utilize the full permissions of your Jupyter user within cloud environments to customize your experience.
Note: You may break notebook functionality when exercising your sudo permissions. The current Terra docker containers rely on specific versions of Jupyter packages and other customizations. Its often easier to break this setup when performing actions that require sudo permission. Therefore, this is an advanced option recommended for power users.
While the given suite of Docker images supplies a wide variety of packages to enable a plug-and-play experience, certain packages require extra permissions to install/upgrade. The packages may:
- be incompatible with a currently installed package
- require a different Python version
- not be installable via pip or conda
- affect protected files during installation
Effective as of early 2026, Jupyter Notebook users can exercise their sudo permissions to resolve these issues themselves.
To use sudo permission within your compute environment, simply add sudo to the beginning of your terminal command (no password required).
Examples of popular customizations that require sudo permission:
1. Install Homebrew
Homebrew is a package manager often used on Linux machines. It can be installed and set up via the following commands:
mkdir homebrew && curl -L https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/tarball/main | tar xz --strip-components 1 -C homebrew
eval "$(homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"
brew update --force --quiet
chmod -R go-w "$(brew --prefix)/share/zsh"2. Update the Java Version
To update the Java version on your virtual machine, run the following commands from the Terminal:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install apt install openjdk-[version]-jdk openjdk-[version]-jre