Installation

Installing IJulia

Go to the Julia Install page.
Follow the instructions recommended to install Julia and the juliaup tool.
Run the Julia application by double-clicking on the icon or running julia in a terminal. This will open the Julia REPL and a window with a julia> prompt will appear.
At the julia> prompt, install IJulia by typing:
```
using Pkg
Pkg.add("IJulia")
```

Info

This process installs a kernel specification for IJulia. The IJulia kernelspec, shorthand for kernel specification, contains the instructions for launching a Julia kernel that a notebook frontend (Jupyter, JupyterLab, nteract) can use. The kernelspec does not install the notebook frontend.

Warning

The command, Pkg.add("IJulia"), does not install Jupyter Notebook itself.

You can install Jupyter Notebook by following the Notebook's installation instructions if you want. Conveniently, Jupyter Notebook can also be installed automatically when you run IJulia.notebook(). See Running the Julia notebook.

You can direct IJulia.notebook() to use a specific Jupyter installation by setting ENV["JUPYTER"] to the path of the jupyter program executable. This environment variable should be set before Pkg.add or before running Pkg.build("IJulia"), and it will remember your preference for subsequent updates.

Updating Julia and IJulia

Julia is improving rapidly, so it won't be long before you want to update your packages or Julia to a more recent version.

Update packages

To update the packages only and keep the same Julia version, run at the Julia prompt (or in IJulia):

Pkg.update()

Update Julia and packages

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")

Important

Pkg.build("IJulia") must be run at the Julia command line. It will error and fail if run within IJulia.

Installing and customizing kernels

You may find it helpful to run multiple Julia kernels to support different Julia executable versions and/or environment settings.

You can install one or more custom Julia kernels by using the IJulia.installkernel function. For example, if you want to run Julia with all deprecation warnings disabled, you can create a custom IJulia kernel:

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. Note that the default kernel that IJulia installs passes the --project=@. option to Julia, if you want to preserve this behaviour for custom kernels make sure to pass it explicitly to IJulia.installkernel:

installkernel("Julia nodeps", "--depwarn=no", "--project=@.")

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 which maps 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 or building IJulia.

Low-level IPython Installations

We recommend using IPython 7.15 or later as well as Python 3.

Using legacy IPython 2.x version

We recognize that some users may need to use legacy 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.