notebooks

IPython Notebooks by Scott Sanderson

Running IPython Notebook

Assuming you have the below dependencies installed, you can run a local notebook server by running:

ipython notebook --matplotlib=inline --notebook-dir=path/to/directory/containing/notebooks

If you're already in the directory containing your notebook, you can omit the --notebook-dir flag.

Once your server is running, you can open, run, and edit your notebooks by going to your browser and entering 127.0.0.1:8888 as the URL. 127.0.0.1 tells your browser to connect to your computer rather than to a remote server, and :8888 tells it to connect to port 8888, which is the default port on which ipython notebook runs. You can change the port for the server by passing --port=<number>.

Creating an Isolated Python Environment

I highly recommend using virtualenv for maintaining isolated python installs for particular projects. I also use the excellent virtualenvwrapper library, which provides a nicer interface for displaying and switching between virtualenvs. You can get both of these modules by running:

pip install virtualenv virtualenvwrapper

Assuming you have both virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper installed, you can create an isolated environment for these notebooks by running

mkvirtualenv <env_name>

(where you can replace <env_name> with the name you actually want to use).

You can then switch between environments using the workon command

Example

workon notebook_env
\# Do notebook stuff.
...
workon some_other_project_env
\# Do other project stuff.

Installing Dependencies

1. If you haven't already done so, create a virtual environment so we have a clean slate and don't interfere with any other projects.
2. Install IPython with all optional dependencies by running pip install ipython[all]
3. Install zipline by running pip install zipline. This will also install zipline's dependencies, including
   • numpy
   • scipy
   • pandas
4. Install matplotlib by running pip install matplotlib. If this is your first time installing matplotlib, you may get errors complaining that you're missing certain C libraries. If you're on OSX I recommend Homebrew for installing these dependencies. It provides an interface similar to package managers like apt-get or yum that you might use on a Linux distribution.