How to create/modify a jupyter notebook from code (python)?

Question

I am trying to automate my project create process and would like as part of it to create a new jupyter notebook and populate it with some cells and content that I usually have in every notebook (i.e., imports, titles, etc.)

Is it possible to do this via python?

petezurich · Accepted Answer · 2022-12-31 07:58:24Z

38

You can do it using nbformat. Below an example taken from Creating an IPython Notebook programatically:

import nbformat as nbf

nb = nbf.v4.new_notebook()
text = """\
# My first automatic Jupyter Notebook
This is an auto-generated notebook."""

code = """\
%pylab inline
hist(normal(size=2000), bins=50);"""

nb['cells'] = [nbf.v4.new_markdown_cell(text),
               nbf.v4.new_code_cell(code)]
fname = 'test.ipynb'

with open(fname, 'w') as f:
    nbf.write(nb, f)

edited Dec 31, 2022 at 7:58

petezurich

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answered Aug 14, 2017 at 10:01

Duccio A

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2 Comments

mirekphd Over a year ago

Note that the auto-gen notebook can be made reasonably complex, as multiple pairs of markdown and code cells can be appended to the list passed to nb ['cells'].

John Carrell Over a year ago

Now this is why I check SO before starting to roll my own latest neat idea. Because someone already had this neat idea! Precisely what I wanted!

StuckAt7 · Accepted Answer · 2016-09-16 20:42:01Z

This is absolutely possible. Notebooks are just json files. This notebook for example is just:

{
 "cells": [
  {
   "cell_type": "markdown",
   "metadata": {},
   "source": [
    "# Header 1"
   ]
  },
  {
   "cell_type": "code",
   "execution_count": 2,
   "metadata": {
    "ExecuteTime": {
     "end_time": "2016-09-16T16:28:53.333738",
     "start_time": "2016-09-16T16:28:53.330843"
    },
    "collapsed": false
   },
   "outputs": [],
   "source": [
    "def foo(bar):\n",
    "    # Standard functions I want to define.\n",
    "    pass"
   ]
  },
  {
   "cell_type": "markdown",
   "metadata": {},
   "source": [
    "## Header 2"
   ]
  },
  {
   "cell_type": "code",
   "execution_count": null,
   "metadata": {
    "collapsed": true
   },
   "outputs": [],
   "source": []
  }
 ],
 "metadata": {
  "kernelspec": {
   "display_name": "Python 2",
   "language": "python",
   "name": "python2"
  },
  "language_info": {
   "codemirror_mode": {
    "name": "ipython",
    "version": 2
   },
   "file_extension": ".py",
   "mimetype": "text/x-python",
   "name": "python",
   "nbconvert_exporter": "python",
   "pygments_lexer": "ipython2",
   "version": "2.7.10"
  },
  "toc": {
   "toc_cell": false,
   "toc_number_sections": true,
   "toc_threshold": 6,
   "toc_window_display": false
  }
 },
 "nbformat": 4,
 "nbformat_minor": 0
}

While messy it's just a list of cell objects. I would probably create my template in an actual notebook and save it rather than trying to generate the initial template by hand. If you want to add titles or other variables programmatically, you could always copy the raw notebook text in the *.ipynb file into a python file and insert values using string formatting.

Thanks for the answer! Was hoping there's an API for adding cells and such since I am afraid new versions will break the hardcoded schemas...

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