the-littlest-jupyterhub: TLJH does not automatically create home directories for new users on Ubuntu Server 18.10

Once tljh was up and running (after I changed the installer locally to use a newer node version), I couldn’t start any notebooks, because the spawner process would time out. I have looked into the logging and came upon the following:

sudo journalctl -u jupyter-testuser:

Nov 22 12:09:20 blockchainlab systemd[1]: Started /bin/bash -c cd /home/jupyter-testuser && exec jupyterhub-singleuser --port=36531.
Nov 22 12:09:20 blockchainlab systemd[20897]: jupyter-testuser.service: Changing to the requested working directory failed: No such file or directory
Nov 22 12:09:20 blockchainlab systemd[20897]: jupyter-testuser.service: Failed at step CHDIR spawning /bin/bash: No such file or directory
Nov 22 12:09:20 blockchainlab systemd[1]: jupyter-testuser.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=200/CHDIR
Nov 22 12:09:20 blockchainlab systemd[1]: jupyter-testuser.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.

I have manually created a home directory for the user, assigned the proper permissions and then restarted the service. After doing so I was able to launch a Python 3 notebook.