Books with Jupyter

Jupyter Book is an open source project for building beautiful, publication-quality books and documents from computational material.

Here are some of the features of Jupyter Book:

Write publication-quality content in Markdown : You can write in either Jupyter Markdown, or an extended flavor of Markdown with publishing features. This includes support for rich syntax such as citations and cross-references, math and equations, and figures.

Write content in Jupyter Notebook : This allows you to include your code and outputs in your book. You can also write notebooks entirely in Markdown that get executed when you build your book.

Execute and cache your book’s content : For .ipynb and Markdown notebooks, execute code and insert the latest outputs into your book. In addition, cache and re-use outputs to be used later.

Insert notebook outputs into your content : Generate outputs as you build your documentation, and insert them in-line with your content across pages.

Add interactivity to your book : You can toggle cell visibility, include interactive outputs from Jupyter, and connect with online services like Binder.

Generate a variety of outputs : This includes single- and multi-page websites, as well as PDF outputs.

Build books with a simple command-line interface : You can quickly generate your books with one command, like so: jupyter-book build mybook/

This website is built with Jupyter Book! You can browse its contents to the left to see what is possible.

:::{admonition,tip} Learn more and get involved

Jupyter Book is an open community that welcomes your feedback, input, and contributions!

💡 Open an issue : to provide feedback and new ideas, and to help others.

📚 See the Jupyter Book Gallery : to be inspired by Jupyter Books that others have created.

👍 Vote for new features : by adding a +1 to issues you’d like to see completed.

🙌 Contribute to Jupyter Book : by following our contributing guidelines and finding an issue to work on. See the feature voting leaderboard for inspiration.

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Install Jupyter Book

You can install Jupyter Book via pip:

pip install -U jupyter-book

This will install everything you need to build a Jupyter Book locally.

Get started

To get started with Jupyter Book, you can either

  • check out the getting started guide,

  • browse the contents of the navigation menu of this book (to the left, if you’re on a laptop), or

  • review the example project shown immediately below (if you like learning from examples).

:::{warning} Jupyter Book 0.8 is a total re-write from previous versions, and some things have changed. See the legacy upgrade guide for how to upgrade, and legacy.jupyterbook.org for legacy documentation.

In addition, note that Jupyter Book is pre-1.0. Its API may change! :::

To install the jupyter-book pre-release from pip, run the following command:

pip install -U jupyter-book

Create a template book to get started right away, or see the getting started guide for more information.

A small example project

Here’s a short example of a web-based book created by Jupyter Book.

Some of the features on display include

The source files can be found on GitHub in the docs directory. These files are written in MyST Markdown, an extension of the Jupyter Notebook Markdown, that allows for additional scientific markup. They could alternatively have been written directly as Jupyter notebooks.

Build the demo book

You can build this book locally on the command line via the following steps:

  1. Ensure you have a recent version of Anaconda Python installed.

  2. Clone the repository containing the demo book source files

    git clone https://github.com/executablebooks/quantecon-mini-example
    cd quantecon-mini-example
    
  3. Install the Python libraries needed to run the code in this particular example from the environment.yml file. This includes the latest version of Jupyter Book:

    conda env create -f environment.yml
    conda activate qe-mini-example
    
  4. Run Jupyter Book over the source files

    jupyter-book build ./mini_book
    
  5. View the result through a browser — try (with, say, firefox)

    firefox mini_book/_build/html/index.html
    

    (or simply double-click on the html file)

Now you might like to try editing the files in mini_book/docs and then rebuilding.

Further reading

See the full QuantEcon example for a longer Jupyter Book use case, drawn from the same source material.

For more information on how to use Jupyter Book, see Overview.

Under the hood - the components of Jupyter Book

Jupyter Book is a wrapper around a collection of tools in the Python ecosystem that make it easier to publish computational documents. Here are a few key pieces:

  • It uses the MyST Markdown language in Markdown and notebook documents. This allows users to write rich, publication-quality markup in their documents.

  • It uses the MyST-NB package to parse and read-in notebooks so they are built into your book.

  • It uses the Sphinx documentation engine to build outputs from your book’s content.

  • It uses a slightly modified version of the PyData Sphinx theme for beautiful HTML output.

  • It uses a collection of Sphinx plugins and tools to add new functionality.

For more information about the project behind many of these tools, see The Executable Book Project documentation.

Contribute to Jupyter Book

Jupyter Book is an open project and we welcome your feedback and contributions! To contribute to Jupyter Book, see Contribute to Jupyter Book.

Acknowledgements

Jupyter Book is supported by an open community of contributors, many of whom come from the Jupyter community. Jupyter Book and many of the tools it uses are stewarded by the Executable Book Project, which is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation.