Running the Jupyter Notebook: A Guide for Data Scientists

Photo credit: Glenn Carstens-Peters via Unsplash

Jupyter Notebook is a popular tool among data scientists for data exploration, visualization, and analysis. It provides an interactive web-based interface that allows users to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations, and narrative text. In this blog post, we will discuss the basic steps to run the Jupyter Notebook, including starting the Notebook server, introducing the Notebook server’s command-line options, opening a specific Notebook, starting the Notebook using a custom IP or port, starting the Notebook server without opening a browser, and getting help about Notebook server options using a command-line interface. Saturn Cloud offers free notebooks in the cloud for when you are ready to level up your data science workflows.

Basic Steps

To run the Jupyter Notebook, you need to follow these basic steps:

1. Install Anaconda or Miniconda: Anaconda is a free and open-source distribution of Python and R programming languages for scientific computing that includes Jupyter Notebook, among other tools. Miniconda is a minimal version of Anaconda that includes only Python and the conda package manager. You can download and install Anaconda or Miniconda from their official websites.

2. Open the Anaconda Navigator or the command prompt: Once you have installed Anaconda or Miniconda, you can open the Anaconda Navigator, a graphical user interface that allows you to launch Jupyter Notebook, among other tools, or the command prompt, a text-based interface that allows you to run commands.

3. Launch Jupyter Notebook: To launch Jupyter Notebook from the Anaconda Navigator, click on the Jupyter Notebook icon, and it will open in your default web browser. To launch Jupyter Notebook from the command prompt run the command below;

$ jupyter notebook

and press Enter, and it will open in your default web browser.

Starting the Notebook Server

When you launch Jupyter Notebook, it starts a Notebook server that runs in the background and listens to HTTP requests from your web browser. The Notebook server provides a web-based interface that allows you to create, edit, and run Notebooks. By default, the Notebook server starts on http://localhost:8888/, which means that it listens to HTTP requests on the localhost (your own computer) and on port 8888. If port 8888 is already in use, the Notebook server will try to find a free port automatically.

Introducing the Notebook Server’s Command Line Options

You can customize the Notebook server’s behavior by passing command-line options when you start it. To see the available options, you can type jupyter notebook --help in the command prompt, and it will show a list of options with their descriptions. Some of the most useful options are:

• –ip: Specifies the IP address that the Notebook server should listen to. By default, it listens to localhost, which means that it only accepts connections from the same computer. You can set it to 0.0.0.0 to accept connections from any computer on the network or to a specific IP address.

• –port: Specifies the port number that the Notebook server should listen to. By default, it listens to 8888, but you can set it to any free port number.

• –no-browser: Starts the Notebook server without opening a web browser. This is useful if you want to run the Notebook server on a remote server without a graphical interface or if you prefer to use a different web browser than your default one.

How do I open a specific Notebook?

To open a specific Notebook, you can either navigate to its directory in the web interface or use the command prompt. If you navigate to the directory that contains the Notebook file, you should see a list of files with the .ipynb extension, which stands for IPython Notebook. Click on the file that you want to open, and it will open in a new tab. If you want to open a Notebook from the command prompt, you can type jupyter notebook notebook.ipynb, where notebook.ipynb is the name of the Notebook file that you want to open.

How do I start the Notebook using a custom IP or port?

To start the Notebook server using a custom IP or port, you can pass the --ip and --port options when you start it. For example, if you want to start the Notebook server on IP address 192.168.0.10 and port 8889, you can type jupyter notebook --ip=192.168.0.10 --port=8889 in the command prompt. This will start the Notebook server on http://192.168.0.10:8889/.

How do I start the Notebook server without opening a browser?

To start the Notebook server without opening a browser, you can pass the --no-browser option when you start it. For example, if you want to start the Notebook server without opening a browser, you can type jupyter notebook --no-browser in the command prompt. This will start the Notebook server in the background, and you can access it by typing http://localhost:8888/ in your web browser.

How do I get help about Notebook server options?

To get help about Notebook server options, you can type jupyter notebook --help in the command prompt, and it will show a list of options with their descriptions. You can also visit the Jupyter Notebook documentation website, which provides detailed information about how to use Jupyter Notebook and its features.

Using a command-line interface

If you prefer to use a command-line interface instead of the web-based interface, you can use the jupyter command-line tool, which provides a set of subcommands that allow you to perform various tasks, such as creating, converting, and running Notebooks. Some of the most useful subcommands are:

• jupyter nbconvert: Converts a Notebook file to another format, such as HTML, PDF, or Markdown.

• jupyter nbextension: Manages Notebook extensions, which are add-ons that provide additional functionality to the Notebook interface.

• jupyter kernelspec: Manages Notebook kernels, which are programming language interpreters that execute the code in a Notebook.

Running the Jupyter Notebook is easy and straightforward, and it provides a powerful tool for data scientists to explore, visualize, and analyze data. By following the basic steps outlined in this blog post, you can start using Jupyter Notebook in no time. You can customize the Notebook server’s behavior by using command-line options, and you can open specific Notebooks by navigating to their directory or using the command prompt. If you prefer to use a command-line interface, you can use the jupyter command-line tool, which provides a set of subcommands that allow you to perform various tasks.