Jupyter Lab

In 2001, Ipython was made as an in interactive command-line terminal for Python. It offers an enhanced read-eval-print loop (REPL) environment.

Later, Jupyter notebook was created as a web-based interactive computing platform for creating and sharing computational documents.

Jupyter Lab is the latest web-based interactive develop environment for notebooks, code and data.

There is also jupyter hub which supports a group of users if that’s your use case.

In this post, I am going to talk about how to install and config jupyter lab.

Install jupyter lab

You can simply do pip install jupyterlab, then you will be able to start your jupyter lab with jupyter lab command.

jupyter_server_config

The configuration is the same as jupyter notebook. You can create a ~/.jupyter/jupyter_notebook_config.py with the following information:

c.ServerApp.ip = "0.0.0.0"                              # use all ipv4 interfaces
c.ServerApp.open_browser = False                        # do not open browser after server started
c.ServerApp.port = 18781                                # set port number for server
c.ServerApp.password = os.getenv("JUPYTER_PASSWORD")    # set password for the server

install new kernel

To use different python environment in jupyterlab, you need to install different kernels. In your python environment, you can install ipykernel. Then run the following command to install it to jupyter lab:

python -m ipykernel install [--user] [--name <machine-readable-name>] [--display-name <"User Friendly Name">]

There is also a –profile param to set the profile to use for this kernel. The default directory for profiles is in ~/.ipython. The default profile is in ~/.ipython/profile_default

startup scripts

The startup scripts are in ~/.ipython/<profile>/startup folder. There is a README in ~/.ipython/profile_default/startup/. It indicates all the .py and .ipy files in the startup directory will be loaded in lexicographical order.