How To Install Jupyter Notebook on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Jupyter Notebook on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Jupyter Notebook is a powerful and open-source tool for the documentation of data and scientific analysis. This tool can be used with several programming languages, including Python, Julia, Ruby, and much more. It is often used for working with data, statistical modeling, and machine learning.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Jupyter Notebook on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Jupyter Notebook on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install software-properties-common apt-transport-https

Step 2. Installing Python.

Now we install Python 3, pip, and other required packages to build Python dependencies:

sudo apt install python3-pip python3-dev

As Pip 3 is already installed on your system, we’ll move forward toward the pip upgrade command:

sudo - pip3 install --upgrade pip

Next, install a Python package for setting a virtual python environment:

sudo - pip3 install virtualenv

Next, we build the Python virtual environment:

mkdir notebook
cd notebook
virtualenv jupyter_env

After that, run the following command to activate this virtual environment:

source jupyter_env/bin/activate

Step 3. Installing Jupyter Notebook on Ubuntu 20.04.

By default, Jupyter Notebook is not available on Ubuntu 20.04 base repository. Now run the following command below to install Jupyter using pip:

pip install jupyter

Let’s start to run the Jupyter Notebook. Run the following command:

jupyter notebook

After executing the command, the browser will open to the home screen of Jupyter Notebook. You can see your virtual environment on the home screen:

Step 4. Create Jupyter Application Menu.

Now create a new file called run-jupyter.sh in your notebook directory:

#!/bin/bash

source /home/username/jupyterenvironment/bin/activate
jupyter notebook

Next, go to the /usr/share/applications directory and create a file named jupyter.desktop with the following code to create an application menu item:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Jupyter Notebook
Exec=/home/username/notebook/run-jupyter.sh
Type=Application
Terminal=true

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Jupyter. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Jupyter Notebook on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Jupyter website.