notebookr

A simple tool to set up development environments for Jupyter notebooks. My motivation: basically, Jupyter notebooks are about the only program type for which it is still generally practiced to distribute the code through email or file sharing.

I was tired of running the same setup process over and over with notebooks that are usually emailed to me. I work in IDEs, usually Cursor and sometimes VSCode, and naturally also work with git.

I complained to claude-3.5-sonnet about that, and here we are.

Using notebookr you can typically cut that setup process down to a very short workflow:

1. Receive and save python notebook (.ipynb) file into a working directory
2. Open a terminal
3. notebookr SomeNotebookYouGot.ipynb
4. code some-notebook-you-got

Once your code editor opens, depening on your workflow, youʻll probably want to open the terminal (ctrl-`) and enter either

5. source .venv/bin/activate ... or:
6. .venv\Scripts\activate # windows

Installation

pip install notebookr

or

uv add notebookr

Usage

notebookr path/to/your/notebook.ipynb

notebookr --with_py path/to/your/notebook.ipynb # Also creates a python copy of the notebook

This will:

1. Create a virtual environment
2. Generate requirements.txt based on imports in your notebook
3. Create a .gitignore
4. Initialize a git repository
5. Install required packages

Version

0.1.1 added --with_py