jp-babel: A babel Kernel for the Jupyter Notebook

jp-babel is an npm package that implements a babel kernel for the Jupyter notebook). A Jupyter notebook combines the creation of rich-text documents (including equations, plots and videos) with the execution of code in a number of programming languages.

The execution of code is carried out by means of a kernel that implements the Jupyter messaging protocol. There are kernels available for Python, Julia, Ruby, Haskell and many other languages.

Proof-of-Concept and Goals

jp-babel came to existence prompted by a number of requests from IJavascript users. See this issue for further details.

By publishing jp-babel I'm seeking to:

• provide users with a "usable" babel kernel that with some support may become a fully featured kernel,

• reuse the IJavascript code and develop a Node.js library to implement Jupyter kernels for other languages.

Installation

Please, refer to the installation notes for IJavascript.

For example, in Ubuntu 14.04, you can run:

sudo apt-get install nodejs-legacy npm ipython ipython-notebook libzmq3-dev
sudo npm install -g jp-babel

babelrc

By default, jp-babel is set to use the preset babel-preset-latest. Users can customise their .babelrc. If they do so, they must ensure all the referenced plugins and presets can be required from within the jp-babel session.

Usage

To install the kernel and start an Jupyter notebook session, run:

jp-babel

Troubleshooting

• jp-babel takes 10-15 seconds on the first execution after kernel start (Issue #4): This issue has been seen on a system using npm 2. As suggested here, running npm dedupe on the folder where jp-babel was installed helps reduce this time. Alternatively, using npm 3 to install jp-babel also helps.

Contributions

First of all, thank you for taking the time to contribute. The maintenance of IJavascript is currently my priority. I would really appreciate some help. Please, read CONTRIBUTING and use the issue tracker for any contributions: support requests, bug reports, enhancement requests, pull requests, submission of tutorials...

TO DO

• Add tests