[ENH] Toggle off the cluster manager section

[jsignell]

The dask-labextension is the combination of two different concepts: cluster management (creation, scaling, and stopping) and dashboard viewing. I think that the dashboard section can be independently useful without the cluster manager. I propose adding a config flag to the plugin.json which would toggle on and off the cluster manager section.

For context, this came up at Saturn Cloud where we'd like to expose the dashboard components in jlab using dask-labextension, but we have our own mechanism for starting clusters that happens outside of jupyterlab.

[jacobtomlinson]

Making this configurable seems reasonable.

[jsignell]

Great! I am happy to work on an implementation.

[ian-r-rose]

Making the cluster manager toggle-able makes sense to me. In fact, the earliest versions of this extension had only the dashboard viewer.

There were a few reasons we added the cluster manager, but one of them was that it made proxying the bokeh server connection through to the dashboard panes easier, and removed the user step of copying/pasting the dashboard URL. If you have your own method for creating clusters that doesn't fit well with the cluster manager UX, you may want to consider how we can feed the right URL to the dashboard viewer.

[ian-r-rose]

Also, welcome back @jacobtomlinson!

[jacobtomlinson]

Thanks @ian-r-rose 😁

[jsignell]

Thanks @ian-r-rose, I think that dask-labextension mechanism for reading the dashboard_link from the client in the active notebook will suit my needs.