Jupyter-app

The fastest standalone app for JupyterLab

A standard OS X .app that, when double-clicked, starts jupyter lab in a fresh terminal and launches an independent instance of the Chromium browser, and redirects the browser to the JupyterLab client. Best of all, the browser and the jupyter server are linked, such that closing/quitting one will also close the other.

Features

• Single command, no hassle installation and uninstallation via dedicated scripts.
• EZ startup and shutdown:
  • Starting the app is as easy as double-clicking on it.
  • Exiting the browser will cleanly shut down the server launched by the jupyter command, and vice-versa.
• Everything that can be automated has been automated, including the handling of the Jupyter security token.
• Built on top of a fresh, unmodified, unextended copy of stock Chromium, so it's as fast as it can be.
• No compiling required, and zero external dependencies (aside from JupyterLab itself).
• The app can also be launched via the command line.

Requirements

The only requirements are OS X and JupyterLab. You can install the latest version of JupyterLab with a single command:

pip install jupyterlab

See the JupyterLab docs for alternative installs (eg using conda) and more details.

Installation

• Open a terminal and enter the following lines:

  git clone https://github.com/telamonian/jupyter-app.git
  cd jupyter-app
  ./install
  

  This will create a new app at /Applications/Jupyter.app that will, when opened, run a new instance of JupyterLab, start up an independent browser, and redirect the browser to the JupyterLab page.

• You can perform a dryrun of the installation by adding a -d flag to the install command:

  ./install -d
  

  In this mode, all commands are printed to stdout instead of executed.

Uninstallation

• Open a terminal, cd to your jupyter-app repo directory, then enter the following single command:

  ./uninstall
  

  You can also perform a dryrun of the uninstall by adding a -d flag to the command.

More info

Command line only workflow

In addition to double clicking on the app installed at /Applications/Jupyter.app, you can also launch the app via the command line.

• Launch the app with this command:

  open -a Jupyter
  

• Can also optionally pass args to the internal jupyter command using the --args flag. For example:

  • If you want the app to start Jupyter Notebook classic instead of JupyterLab, you'd run:

    open -a Jupyter --args notebook
    

  • If you want the app to start JupyterLab in development mode, you'd' run:

    open -a Jupyter --args lab --dev-mode
    

Installation options

The default install should work in most cases. However, if you want to customize your installation of Jupyter app there are many options available in install.conf:

• APP_NAME
  • Sets the name that the app will be displayed as both in Finder and on the dock.
  • Default = Jupyter
• APP_DIR
  • Sets the installation directory for Jupyter app. When ./install is run, the new app will be created at ${APP_DIR}/${APP_NAME}.app.
  • Default = /Applications
• JUPYTER_CMD
  • Should be "lab" for jupyterlab, or "notebook" for standard jupyter notebook.
  • Default = "lab"
• APP_BASE
  • The browser used by Jupyter app. Needs to be one of chrome | chromium.
  • Default = chromium
• TERM_NAME
  • Which terminal application the app should use to launch the Jupyter server when it starts up. Currently only the standard Apple Terminal and iTerm2 are supported.
  • Default = Terminal
• VIRTUAL_ENV
  • Absolute path to virtual environment activation script, if any.
  • Default = none

Adding your own themes/extensions to the automated installer

• More information to come. For now, take a peek at resource/chrome_extension_specs in the repo and this Chrome dev page if you want to know more.

The schpiel

I've been a user of IPython and Jupyter notebooks for years (in fact, I'm now a core developer for JupyterLab). The notebooks are the perfect middle ground in between coding on the command line and full-on scripting. My biggest complaint is that their performance, while not abysmal, is not so great. When I have a long notebook, or a short notebook with 4 or 5 figures or long output cells, there tends to be quite a bit of lag.

So what I've wanted for a while is a dedicated Jupyter application, one that isn't bogged down by unnecessary extensions (adblock, for example) or the 20 Wikipedia tabs I happen to have open at the time. After trying many different browsers and standalone projects (most notably pineapple), I found that none of them were as fast as stock Chrome when it came to running a notebook. I started to wonder if it was possible to run two separate copies of Chrome side-by-side... and, well, after a year or-so of intermittent tinkering, I got it to work.

I figured that a patched copy of Chrome would be hard to maintain with the march of their versions, not to mention the copyright issues. Instead, I designed Jupyter-app as a set of wrappers, and made only minimal changes to the underlying app and its contents. So far this approach has worked out well, as I've been able to get Chrome to do everything I've wanted by tweaking the behavior of the program during its kickoff.

Future work

• Add a way to keep track of options used for latest install
  • Currently there are a few ways in which a user could break the uninstaller if they change any options before uninstalling the program.

Finished work

The following items were previously under "Future work", but are now done:

• ~~Add a command-line only workflow, ie make a way to launch Jupyter and the customized browser together without needing to invoke the .app directly.~~
  • Done!
• ~~Find a way to automatically terminate the jupyter notebook session when the linked browser is closed~~
  • Done!
  • Works via the bash wait command.
  • Look in resource/app_mid_wrap for details.
• ~~selectable install location (right now this is fixed at /Applications)~~
  • Done!
• ~~selectable terminal for launching the Jupyter Notebook instance (currently this is dependent upon iTerm2)~~
  • Done!

The next version of jupyter-app

In part, this project has been a way to sharpen my bash scripting skills, and to answer an age-old question in the field of yak shaving studies: "how complicated of a program can you write using nothing but bash?".

I feel like I've more or less come to a definitive answer to that question. Since the initial release of jupyter-app, I've added many features. Currently, I think I'm coming up against the limitations of bash, especially since OS X is stuck with bash v3 (due to to licensing issues), and will never ship with bash v4 preinstalled.

Eventually, I plan to replace jupyter-app with a more flexible Python-based JupyterLab installation tool. Here's some features I'd like to add in the Python version:

• Run cross-platform, and be able to install a working desktop app on OS X, Linux, and Windows.

• Handle installation of JupyterLab itself.

• Handle setup and management of JupyterLab compatible virtual environments, including setup of all data/config paths used by jupyter