Jupyter Cookbook: Over 75 recipes to perform interactive computing across Python, R, Scala, Spark, JavaScript, and more

Jupyter, as a project, grew out of Python, so it is somewhat dependent on which version of Python you have installed. For Python 2 installations, the command line steps to install Jupyter are:

python -m pip install --upgrade pip
python -m pip install jupyter

This assumes you have pip installed. The pip system is a package management system written in Python. To install pip on your Windows machine, execute the following line:

python get-pip.py

As you can see, this is all Python (this code calls Python to execute a standard Python script).

Anaconda provides the tools to install a number of programs, including Jupyter. Once you have installed Anaconda, Jupyter will be available to you already.

The only issue I found was that the engine installed was Python 2 instead of Python 3. There is a process that Anaconda uses to decide which version of Python to run on your machine. In my case, I started out with Python 2. To upgrade to Python 3, I used these commands:

conda create -n py3k python=3 
anaconda source activate py3k 
ipython kernelspec install-self

After this, when you start Jupyter, you will have the Python 3 engine choice.

You may prefer to have the Python 2 engine also available. This might be if you want to use scripts that were written using Python 2. The commands to add Python 2 back in as an engine choice are:

python2 -m pip install ipykernel 
python2 -m ipykernel install --user

You should now see Python 2 and Python 3 as engine choices when you start Jupyter:

Just as with Windows earlier, we download the latest version of Anaconda and run the installation program. One of the screens should look like this:

The Anaconda install is very typical for Mac installs: users can run the program and make sure they want to allocate so much storage for the application to install. 

Once installed, Jupyter (and Anaconda Navigator) is available just like any other application on the system. You can run Jupyter directly, or you can launch Jupyter from the Anaconda Navigator display.

Many Mac users will prefer using the command line to install Jupyter. Using the command line, you can decide whether to install Jupyter with the Python 2 or Python 3 engine. If you want to add the Python 2 engine as a choice in Jupyter, you can follow similar steps for doing so in the earlier Windows command line installation section.

The script to install Jupyter on Mac via the command line with the Python 3 engine is:

bash ~/Downloads/Anaconda3-5.0.0-MacOSX-x86_64.sh

Similarly, the command to install with the Python 2 engine is as follows:

bash ~/Downloads/Anaconda2-5.0.0-MacOSX-x86_64.sh

In either case, you will be prompted by some regular install questions:

At this point, you should be able to start Jupyter with the command line and see the appropriate engine choice available:

jupyter notebook

We can see an example of a collision with a Notebook that allows for data entry from a user and responds with incorrect results:

from ipywidgets import interact
def myfunction(x):
    return x
interact(myfunction, x= "Hello World ");

We can have a Notebook server that expects multiple users and separates their instances from each other without the annoying collisions occurring. A Notebook server includes the standard Jupyter Notebook application that we have seen, but a server can also include software to distinguish the data of one user from another. We'll cover several examples of this solution in Chapter 8, Multiuser Environments.