How do I get IPython profile behavior from Jupyter

Question

There was official(?) recommendation of running an IPython Notebook server, and creating a profile via

$ ipython profile create nbserver

as recommended in http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/1/interactive/public_server.html. This allowed for very different and very useful behavior when starting an IPython Notebook via ipython notebook and ipython notebook --profile=nbserver.

With Jupyter 4.0, there's a change and there are no longer profiles. I've found the conversation https://gitter.im/ipython/ipython/archives/2015/05/29 which has user minrk saying:

The .ipython directory has several things in it:

multiple config directories (called profiles)

one 'data' directory, containing things like kernelspecs, nbextensions

runtime info scattered throughout, but mostly in profiles

Jupyter follows more platform-appropriate conventions:

one config dir at JUPYTER_CONFIG_DIR, default: .jupyter

one data dir at JUPYTER_DATA_DIR, default: platform-specific

one runtime dir at JUPYTER_RUNTIME_DIR, default: platform-specific

And a rather cryptic remark:

If you want to use different config, specify a different config directory with JUPYTER_CONFIG_DIR=whatever

What's the best way to get different behavior (say, between when running as a server vs normal usage)?

Will it involve running something like:

$ export JUPYTER_CONFIG_DIR=~/.jupyter-nbserver
$ jupyter notebook

whenever a server 'profile' needs to be run? and

$ export JUPYTER_CONFIG_DIR=~/.jupyter
$ jupyter notebook

whenever a 'normal' profile needs to run? Because that seems terrible. What's the best way to do this in Jupyter 4.0?

Answer 1

Using some code from this blog post http://www.svds.com/jupyter-notebook-best-practices-for-data-science/ and updating it. The easiest solution appears to be to create an alias, like:

alias jupyter-nbserver='JUPYTER_CONFIG_DIR=~/.jupyter-nbserver jupyter notebook'

So now you can run the jupyter notebook with a different config via the simple command jupyter-nbserver.

A more robust solution might involve creating a bash function that changes the environment variable, checks whether there's a config file, if not creating one, then executing, but that's probably overkill. The answer that I give on this related question https://stackoverflow.com/a/32516200/246856 goes into creating the initial config files for a new 'profile'.