bee4750

Development of Julia notebooks and assignments for BEE 4750

Pluto

The notebooks are developed using Pluto. They can be saved and run as regular Julia scripts, or the raw scripts can be imported into a Pluto server. There are several advantages to Pluto:

• Pluto notebooks are reactive: when changes are made to a cell, all cells which depend on that cell are updated.
• Pluto notebooks can be saved as regular .jl files and executed in a Julia IDE or at the Julia command prompt (called the REPL); there are no weird file formats or other dependencies.

Installation (need to document this in class)

1. Install the most recent version of Julia from https://julialang.org/downloads.
2. Test Julia by running julia in a terminal. Make sure the REPL starts, and execute something (like 1+1).
3. Install Pluto. Open the Julia REPL.

• Switch to package mode by typing ] at the prompt. The prompt should change to a blue pkg> instead of the original green julia>.

julia> ]

(@v1.6) pkg>

• Execute add Pluto to download and install the Pluto package.

(@v1.6) pkg> add Pluto

4. You can now close the terminal, or you can hit CTRL+C to exit package mode and return to the standard julia> prompt.

Running a notebook

1. Start Pluto in the Julia REPL:

julia> using Pluto
julia> Pluto.run()

2. Your browser might automatically open the notebook server's URL (something like http://localhost:1234/). If not, the URL will be printed in the REPL, so open it.

3. If you want to open a notebook from Github (or any other remote location), copy and paste the link into the Open from file: box. The easiest way to get this link is by navigating to the repository page (this one!), clicking on the desired folder (such as tutorials), right-clicking on the desired file, and copying the link.

   If you want to open a locally-hosted file (such as if you cloned the repository), enter the path to the file.

4. You can save a notebook locally using the Save notebook: prompt. Once this is done, notebooks are autosaved when run. The resulting .jl file can be shared with others and submitted to Canvas.