notebook/CONTRIBUTING.rst

Contributing to the Jupyter Notebook

TODO: a welcoming sentence

General Guidelines

For general documentation about contributing to Jupyter projects, see the Project Jupyter Contributor Documentation.

Setting Up a Development Environment

If you have already installed the dependencies mentioned below, the following steps should get you going:

pip install setuptools pip --upgrade --user
git clone https://github.com/jupyter/notebook
cd notebook
pip install -e . --user

If you want the development environment to be available for all users of your system (assuming you have the necessary rights), just drop the --user option.

Installing the Dependencies

Python Development Libraries

On Debian/Ubuntu systems, you can get them with:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3-dev

The development libraries might be needed for the installation of PyZMQ, Tornado and Jinja2.

Alternatively -- if you prefer -- you can also install those packages directly with your package manager:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3-zmq python3-tornado python3-jinja2

Node.js and npm

Building the Notebook from its GitHub source code requires some tools to create and minify JavaScript components and the CSS.

You can use the pre-built installer from the Node.js website. The installer will include Node.js and Node's package manager, npm.

Or you can use your system's package manager ...

If you use Homebrew on Mac OS X:

brew install node

For Debian/Ubuntu systems, you should use the nodejs-legacy package instead of the node package:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nodejs-legacy npm

Rebuilding JavaScript and CSS

There is a build step for the JavaScript and CSS in the notebook. To make sure that you are working with up-to-date code, you will need to run this command whenever there are changes to JavaScript or LESS sources:

python setup.py js css

Prototyping Tip

When doing prototyping which needs quick iteration of the Notebook's JavaScript, run this in the root of the repository:

npm run build:watch

This will cause WebPack to monitor the files you edit and recompile them on the fly.

Git Hooks

If you want to automatically update dependencies, recompile the JavaScript, and recompile the CSS after checking out a new commit, you can install post-checkout and post-merge hooks which will do it for you:

git-hooks/install-hooks.sh

See git-hooks/README.md for more details.

Running Tests

JavaScript Tests

To run the JavaScript tests, you will need to have PhantomJS and CasperJS installed:

npm install -g casperjs phantomjs@1.9.18

Then, to run the JavaScript tests:

python -m notebook.jstest [group]

where [group] is an optional argument that is a path relative to notebook/tests/. For example, to run all tests in notebook/tests/notebook:

python -m notebook.jstest notebook

or to run just notebook/tests/notebook/deletecell.js:

python -m notebook.jstest notebook/deletecell.js

Python Tests

Install dependencies:

pip install -e .[test] --user

To run the Python tests, use:

nosetests

If you want coverage statistics as well, you can run:

nosetests --with-coverage --cover-package=notebook notebook

Building the Documentation

Install dependencies:

pip install -e .[doc] --user

To build the HTML docs:

cd docs
make html

After that, the generated HTML files will be available at build/html/index.html.

You can automatically check if all hyperlinks are still valid:

make linkcheck

Windows users can find make.bat in the docs folder.

You should also have a look at the Project Jupyter Documentation Guide.