Jupyter Notebook with Virtual Environments (venv)

Introduction

As a Python developer, you might have heard of Jupyter Notebook. A powerful tool for data scientists and researchers to use Python interactively. One of the main features of Jupyter Notebook is the ability to work with code snippets in a more visual and interactive way. However, when it comes to managing Python dependencies, it can get a bit tricky.

That's where virtual environments come in handy. Virtual environments are independent Python environments that allow you to install packages and dependencies without affecting the system Python installation.

In this guide, we will learn how to use Jupyter Notebook with virtual environments using the built-in 'venv' package in Python.

Prerequisites

Before we get started, you should have:

• Python 3.3 or higher installed on your system
• Basic knowledge of Python and virtual environments
• Jupyter Notebook installed on your system

Creating a Virtual Environment

First, we need to create a virtual environment. Open your terminal and navigate to the directory where you want to create your virtual environment.

$ mkdir myproject
$ cd myproject
$ python3 -m venv venv

The above commands create a new directory called 'myproject' and a virtual environment inside it called 'venv'.

Activating the Virtual Environment

The next step is to activate the virtual environment. This is where all the packages we install inside the virtual environment will reside. To activate the virtual environment, run the following command:

$ source venv/bin/activate

This should change your terminal prompt to show the name of your virtual environment, as below:

(venv) $

Installing Required Packages

We can now install all the required packages for our Jupyter Notebook inside the virtual environment. To install Jupyter Notebook, run the following command:

(venv) $ pip install jupyter

Running Jupyter Notebook

Now that we have everything installed, we can launch Jupyter Notebook and start coding. To launch Jupyter Notebook, run the following command:

(venv) $ jupyter notebook

This will open up a browser window where you can create or open existing Jupyter Notebook files.

Conclusion

In this guide, we learned how to use Jupyter Notebook with virtual environments. Virtual environments are a great way to manage dependencies and packages in isolated environments. By following these steps, you can create a virtual environment, install Jupyter Notebook and start coding.