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Installation

Installing IJulia

First, install Julia from Download Julia page. Then run the Julia application (double-click on it); a window with a julia> prompt will appear. After ensuring that you have activated the default Julia environment, at the prompt, type:

using Pkg
Pkg.add("IJulia")

to install IJulia.

This process installs a kernel specification that tells Jupyter (or JupyterLab) etcetera how to launch Julia.

Pkg.add("IJulia") does not actually install Jupyter itself. You can install Jupyter if you want, but it can also be installed automatically when you run IJulia.notebook() below. (You can force it to use a specific jupyter installation by setting ENV["JUPYTER"] to the path of the jupyter program before Pkg.add, or before running Pkg.build("IJulia"); your preference is remembered on subsequent updates.

Updating Julia and IJulia

Julia is improving rapidly, so it won't be long before you want to update to a more recent version. To update the packages only, keeping Julia itself the same, just run:

Pkg.update()

at the Julia prompt (or in IJulia).

If you download and install a new version of Julia from the Julia web site, you will also probably want to update the packages with Pkg.update() (in case newer versions of the packages are required for the most recent Julia). In any case, if you install a new Julia binary (or do anything that changes the location of Julia on your computer), you must update the IJulia installation (to tell Jupyter where to find the new Julia) by running

Pkg.build("IJulia")

at the Julia command line (important: not in IJulia).

Installing additional Julia kernels

You can also install additional Julia kernels, for example, to pass alternative command-line arguments to the julia executable, by using the IJulia.installkernel function. See the help for this function (? IJulia.installkernel in Julia) for complete details.

For example, if you want to run Julia with all deprecation warnings disabled, you can do:

using IJulia
installkernel("Julia nodeps", "--depwarn=no")

and a kernel called Julia nodeps 0.7 (if you are using Julia 0.7) will be installed (will show up in your main Jupyter kernel menu) that lets you open notebooks with this flag.

You can also install kernels to run Julia with different environment variables, for example to set JULIA_NUM_THREADS for use with Julia multithreading:

using IJulia
installkernel("Julia (4 threads)", env=Dict("JULIA_NUM_THREADS"=>"4"))

The env keyword should be a Dict mapping environment variables to values.

To prevent IJulia from installing a default kernel when the package is built, define the IJULIA_NODEFAULTKERNEL environment variable before adding/building IJulia.

Low-level Information

Using older IPython versions

While we strongly recommend using IPython version 3 or later (note that this has nothing to do with whether you use Python version 2 or 3), we recognize that in the short term some users may need to continue using IPython 2.x. You can do this by checkout out the ipython2 branch of the IJulia package:

Pkg.checkout("IJulia", "ipython2")
Pkg.build("IJulia")

Manual installation of IPython

First, you will need to install a few prerequisites:

  • You need version 3.0 or later of IPython, or version 4 or later of Jupyter. Note that IPython 3.0 was released in February 2015, so if you have an older operating system you may have to install IPython manually. On Mac and Windows systems, it is currently easiest to use the Anaconda Python installer.

  • To use the IPython notebook interface, which runs in your web browser and provides a rich multimedia environment, you will need to install the jsonschema, Jinja2, Tornado, and pyzmq (requires apt-get install libzmq-dev and possibly pip install --upgrade --force-reinstall pyzmq on Ubuntu if you are using pip) Python packages. (Given the pip installer, pip install jsonschema jinja2 tornado pyzmq should normally be sufficient.) These should have been automatically installed if you installed IPython itself via easy_install or pip.

  • To use the IPython qtconsole interface, you will need to install PyQt4 or PySide.

  • You need Julia version 0.7 or later.

Once IPython 3.0+ and Julia 0.7+ are installed, you can install IJulia from a Julia console by typing:

Pkg.add("IJulia")

This will download IJulia and a few other prerequisites, and will set up a Julia kernel for IPython.

If the command above returns an error, you may need to run Pkg.update(), then retry it, or possibly run Pkg.build("IJulia") to force a rebuild.