Using a Conda environment in Jupyter

Conda environment

A Conda environment is a type of virtual environment. Conda environments are used to contain a set of software/packages that you install (via Conda) into that environment that may be accessed any time you activate the environment. To learn more about Conda environments, please see our wiki page on creating Conda environments here.

Open OnDemand

Open OnDemand is a web-based service that allows users to run software with a graphical user interface (GUI) such as Jupyter Notebook. Please see our wiki page on Open OnDemand here to learn more.

Using a Conda environment in Jupyter

These steps will allow you to access the software you install into a Conda environment within Jupyter Notebook running on Open OnDemand

Create the Conda environment

Create your Conda environment and install any packages you will want to use.

Install ipykernel

While your Conda environment is still activated, install ipykernel to your Conda environment with:

conda install ipykernel
python -m ipykernel install --user --name=my_env

Note: change my_env to whatever the name of your Conda environment is. This is the name that you will see in Jupyter Notebook as an available kernel.

Open Jupyter in Open OnDemand

Click on the Jupyter app in Open OnDemand and click launch at the bottom of the page to start a Jupyter Notebook session.

Once the job starts, click on Connect to Jupyter. This will open Jupyter in a new page in your browser.

From here, click "new" and you should see the name of the ipykernel you created. Clicking on that will start a Jupyter notebook with a kernel that has access to all of the packages in your Conda environment.