Running IJulia

Running the IJulia Notebook

If you are comfortable managing your own Python/Jupyter installation, you can just run jupyter notebook yourself in a terminal. To simplify installation, however, you can alternatively type the following in Julia, at the julia> prompt:

using IJulia
notebook()

to launch the IJulia notebook in your browser.

The first time you run notebook(), it will prompt you for whether it should install Jupyter. Hit enter to have it use the Conda.jl package to install a minimal Python+Jupyter distribution (via Miniconda) that is private to Julia (not in your PATH). On Linux, it defaults to looking for jupyter in your PATH first, and only asks to installs the Conda Jupyter if that fails; you can force it to use Conda on Linux by setting ENV["JUPYTER"]="" during installation (see above). (In a Debian or Ubuntu GNU/Linux system, install the package jupyter-client to install the system jupyter.)

You can use notebook(detached=true) to launch a notebook server in the background that will persist even when you quit Julia. This is also useful if you want to keep using the current Julia session instead of opening a new one.

julia> using IJulia; notebook(detached=true)
Process(`'C:\Users\JuliaUser\.julia\v0.7\Conda\deps\usr\Scripts\jupyter' notebook`, ProcessRunning)

julia>

By default, the notebook "dashboard" opens in your home directory (homedir()), but you can open the dashboard in a different directory with notebook(dir="/some/path").

Alternatively, you can run

jupyter notebook

from the command line (the Terminal program in MacOS or the Command Prompt in Windows). Note that if you installed jupyter via automated Miniconda installer in Pkg.add, above, then jupyter may not be in your PATH; type import Conda; Conda.SCRIPTDIR in Julia to find out where Conda installed jupyter.

A "dashboard" window like this should open in your web browser. Click on the New button and choose the Julia option to start a new "notebook". A notebook will combine code, computed results, formatted text, and images, just as in IPython. You can enter multiline input cells and execute them with shift-ENTER, and the menu items are mostly self-explanatory. Refer to the Jupyter notebook documentation for more information, and see also the "Help" menu in the notebook itself.

Given an IJulia notebook file, you can execute its code within any other Julia file (including another notebook) via the NBInclude package.

Running the JupyterLab

Instead of running the classic notebook interface, you can use the IDE-like JupyterLab. If you are comfortable managing your own JupyterLab installation, you can just run jupyter lab yourself in a terminal. To simplify installation, however, you can alternatively type the following in Julia, at the julia> prompt:

using IJulia
jupyterlab()

Like notebook(), above, this will install JupyterLab via Conda if it is not installed already. jupyterlab() also supports detached and dir keyword options similar to notebook().

Running nteract

The nteract Desktop is an application that lets you work with notebooks without a Python installation. First, install IJulia (but do not run notebook() unless you want a Python installation) and then nteract.

Other IPython interfaces

Most people will use the notebook (browser-based) interface, but you can also use the IPython qtconsole or IPython terminal interfaces by running ipython qtconsole --kernel julia-0.7 or ipython console --kernel julia-0.7, respectively. (Replace 0.7 with whatever major Julia version you are using.)