Launching Jupyter notebook server on startup

Posted in Labels: , , , | at 11:00

In this post, I show how to automatically run the Jupyter notebook server on an OSX machine on startup, without using extra terminal windows.

Background

Jupyter notebooks provide a useful interactive environment (think better alternative for console) for scripting languages like Python, Julia, Lua/torch, which has become a favourite tool of many data scientists for handling datasets that fit into the laptop’s memory. If you have not used it, try it next time you do data analysis or prototype an algorithm.

The Pain

There is a slight technical difficulty, though. The way Jupyter works is you run a server process on your machine (or somewhere in the network), and then access it through a web client. I have noticed a popular pattern of usage in the local-server case: a user runs the command to start the server process in the terminal then keeps the terminal window open while she is using the notebook. This method has several flaws:

  • you need to run the process manually each time you need a notebook (after reboot);
  • you have to remember the command line arguments;
  • the process takes up a terminal window/tab, or, if you run it in the background, you can accidentally close the tab and your RAM state will be lost.

The Solution

If your perfectionist’s feelings are hurt by those nuisances above, my setup may remedy it. It uses launchd framework that starts, stops, and manages background processes. 

First, create a property list file in your ~/Library/LaunchAgents directory: 

~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.blippar.jupyter-ipython.plist

and put the following text there. This is a custom format, which is not quite XML (e.g. order of children nodes apparently matters). I highlighted red the paths and other variables you will have to change:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
  "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
      <plist version="1.0">
      <dict>
          <key>KeepAlive</key>
          <true/>
          <key>Label</key>
          <string>com.blippar.jupyter-ipython</string>
          <key>ProgramArguments</key>
          <array>
              <string>zsh</string>
              <string>-c</string>
              <string>source ~/.zshrc;workon py3;jupyter notebook --notebook-dir /Users/roman/jupyter-nb --no-browser</string>
          </array>
          <key>RunAtLoad</key>
          <true/>
          <key>StandardErrorPath</key>
          <string>/Users/roman/Library/LaunchAgents/jupyter-notebook.stderr</string>
          <key>StandardOutPath</key>
          <string>/Users/roman/Library/LaunchAgents/jupyter-notebook.stdout</string>
      </dict>
      </plist>
     
The most interesting part is the ProgramArguments entry. As it is impossible to specify several commands as an argument, I had to run a separate shell instance and pass the commands separated by semicolons. If you do not need to set the virtual environment (workon py3), you might get away without calling the shell, although I recommend always using virtualenv for python on a local machine. Also, I use zsh; replace it with your shell of choice.

To check if everything works, run
launchctl load com.blippar.jupyter-ipython
launchctl start com.blippar.jupyter-ipython

and open http://localhost:8888/tree in your browser. Hopefully, you see the list of available notebooks.

Linux users, you should be able to replicate this with systemd (although, chances are you already know that =).

Read Users' Comments (6)

6 Response to "Launching Jupyter notebook server on startup"

  1. Lewis Clark says:
    14 March 2017 at 22:11

    Great post! I just follow the same instructions. And now i am enable to automatically run the Jupyter notebook server on an OSX machine without using any extra terminal windows. Good work!

  2. Krishna says:
    30 April 2018 at 09:00

    Thanks for the post. Its helped to setup it up on my mac.

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    26 May 2018 at 09:18

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  4. Dharani M says:
    11 December 2018 at 10:34

    Nice blog
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  5. MS Dynamics says:
    16 November 2019 at 09:51

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  6. Sowmiya R says:
    10 July 2020 at 20:25

    Kudos for delivering such an informative post. Have understood a lot from this concept. Gonna follow your updates from now on.

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