JupyterLab Guide

This guide is outdated and unmaintained.

JupyterLab is the next generation UI of Jupyter Notebook (formly known as IPython Notebook).

Installation

JupyterLab can be installed via conda, pip, and pipenv.

For example, to install with conda:

conda install -c conda-forge jupyterlab

Once installed, you can start it with:

jupyter lab

To shut down JupyterLab, first shut down all kernels via Kernel menu, then type ctrl-c.

Notebooks

Jupyter notebooks combines:

1. live runnable code cells
2. text cells (Markdown, LaTeX equations, images, interactive visualizations)

Multiple view(tabs) can be opened for the same notebook, with synced content.

The blue collapse button on left of each cell can trigger collapsing and expanding cells.

Right-click on a notebook and select "New Console for Notebook" can attach to the notebook kernel. This provides a log of all computations done in the kernel (in the order in the order in which they were done), and a place to interactively inspect kernel state without changing the notebook.

Raw HTML

IPython kernel provides a variety of convenience classes for displaying rich output, including HTML:

1from IPython.display import display, HTML
2display(HTML('<del>Hello World</del>'))

or

1from IPython.display import display
2display({'text/html': '<del>Hello World</del>'}, raw=True)

MIME types supported by default:

• document: text/markdown, text/html, text/latex, application/vdom.v1+json (Virtual DOM)
• images: image/bmp, image/gif, image/jpeg, image/png, image/svg+xml
• data: application/json, application/vnd.vega.v2+json, application/vnd.vegalite.v1+json
• other: CSV (as .csv files, no MIME type), PDF (as .pdf files, with application/pdf MIME type, view only)

Other Jupyter kernels offer similar APIs.

Keymap

Keyboard shortcuts can be viewed in menu, context menu, and command palette (Commands tab of sidebar).

Keyboard shortcut for command palette: Ctrl+Shift+c

Code Cell/Console

• Tab: complete.
• Shift+Tab: tooltip.
• Shift+Enter: run code.

Image File Viewer

• + and -: zoom
• [ and ]: rotate
• H and V: flip horizontally/vertically
• I: invert the colors
• 0: reset

Mouse

Besides keyboard, mouse is also useful. Drag and drop cells within one notebook to rearrange them; drag and drop cells within notebooks to copy content; drag and drop tabs to arrange their layout.

Extensions

JupyterLab extensions are npm packages.

To install extensions, first install nodejs. For example, via conda:

conda install -c conda-forge nodejs

Then use jupyter labextension to manage extensions, via invoking subcommands like list, install/uninstall, enable/unable.

Tools and Services

nbdime

nbdime provides tools for diffing and merging of Jupyter Notebooks.

• nbdiff compare notebooks in a terminal-friendly way
• nbmerge three-way merge of notebooks with automatic conflict resolution
• nbdiff-web shows you a rich rendered diff of notebooks
• nbmerge-web gives you a web-based three-way merge tool for notebooks
• nbshow present a single notebook in a terminal-friendly way

nbconvert

nbconvert allows you to convert a Jupyter .ipynb notebook document file into another static format including HTML, LaTeX, PDF, Markdown, reStructuredText, and more.

nbviewer is a free web service based on nbconvert to share static html versions of notebook files.

Binder

Binder is a free web service to turn a GitHub repo into a collection of interactive notebooks:

1. Enter an URL to a GitHub repo of Jupyter notebooks.
2. Binder builds a Docker image for the repository, based on requirements.txt or environment.yml in repository's root directory.
3. Binder launches a JupyterHub server. It provides a reusable/shareable link to live repository.