I really like working in Jupyterlab but getting it to work nicely is always a bit challenging, these are my notes for roughly how I have it set up.

Conda

I use miniconda3 with the package directory set up to point to somewhere other than the home directory because the university system I’m working on only gives a small amount of space in your home directory.

My ~/.condarc contains:

channel_priority: strict
channels:
  - conda-forge
  - defaults

channel_priority: strict is supposed to speed up conda complicated dependency resolution system, and I heard on the grapevine that conda-forge packages tend to be more up to date than the ones in default so I’ve switched the priority.

I then have a “base” environment where I’ve install jupyterlab,

Hint: you can use conda env export --from-history to see the packages you actually installed into a conda environment rather than the ones that were installed as dependencies, I wish there were a shorter form for this command because I think it’s really useful.

Base env

$(base) conda env export –from-history name: base channels:

• conda-forge
• defaults dependencies:
• python=3.8
• jupyterlab
• jupyterlab-git
• nb_conda_kernels

jupyterlab is the package that runs the show, we also have jupyterlab-git which is a git plugin for it and nb_conda_kernels which allows jupyter in the base env to see the other environments on the system.

other envs

Now I have project specific envs where I actually run python code. Here’s an example one:

name: fk channels:

• conda-forge
• defaults dependencies:
• python=3.8
• scipy
• numpy
• matplotlib
• munch prefix: /home/tch14/miniconda3/envs/fk

Remote Acess

I often use my laptop to access a Jupyterlab server running on a beefier machine under my desk at work, the ~/.shh/config on my laptop contains

host beefyremote
    user [username]
        hostname [hostname]
        proxyJump [a machine that you need to jump through if necessary]
        IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa_password_protected
        #give access to the jupyter server on [beefyremote]:8888 to localhost:8889
        LocalForward 8889 localhost:8888
        #LocalCommand 

I open this connection and then run jupyter lab --no-browser --port=8888 within a tmux session on the remote machine so that the server doesn’t die with the connection.