Installing Jupyter Notebook on a Chromebook

If you haven’t set up your local Linux environment on your Chromebook yet, please read the Programming Locally on a Chromebook article first. And if you’re using a Mac or Windows computer, learn how to install Jupyter Notebook on your device.

Installing Jupyter Notebook on Chromebooks

Many of our Codecademy off-platform projects use Jupyter Notebooks, so that’s what we’ll teach you to set that up here. We’ll be using your terminal for most of this process!

We show you two ways to install Jupyter Notebook in this article, but we suggest you use pip to install Jupyter Notebook.

Option 1: Using pip

pip is a useful command we can use to download Python packages.

1. In order to install some packages, we’ll need to install their dependencies. There are a lot of packages that can assist us as we install cool packages in the future, so we’ll download some of the common dependencies. The following command is long, but it’s doing a lot! When the installation pauses, type “y” to answer “yes”.

   yourusername@penguin:~$ sudo apt install build-essential libssl-dev libffi-dev python3-dev libhdf5-dev
   
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2. Next, we’ll install pip using the apt install command. We’ll add the -y flag to automatically say “yes” to the prompt we know occurs partway through installation.

   yourusername@penguin:~$ sudo apt install -y python3-pip
   
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3. Now, we can use pip to install Jupyter Notebook. Since we’re using Python 3, we’ll actually need to use the command pip3 instead of pip.

   yourusername@penguin:~$ sudo pip3 install jupyter
   
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Once complete, we can check that Jupyter Notebook was successfully installed by running jupyter notebook from a Terminal. This will start up the Jupyter Notebook server, print out some information about the notebook server in the console, and open up a new browser tab to http://localhost:8888.

Option 2: Miniconda (Optional Advanced Method)

Miniconda Disclaimer

Miniconda is a helpful package manager that can help you install useful packages. Miniconda can also be used to install Jupyter Notebook, but, unfortunately, we can’t install it on all Chromebooks.

If you have already used pip to install Jupyter Notebook, you can skip this section.

To see if you can install Miniconda, we’ll use the command dpkg --print-architecture.

yourusername@penguin:~$ dpkg --print-architecture
arm64

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If your system prints arm64, then you cannot install Miniconda. Skip to the “Using pip“ section below.

Miniconda Installation

1. To know what version of Miniconda we’ll need to download, we’ll need to check your Chrome OS version. Open your “Settings” and navigate to “About Chrome OS”. You should see an image that will a version and if your computer is “32-bit” or “64-bit”. Remember that bit number!

2. Next, we’ll download the Miniconda installer from the “Linux installers” section of the Miniconda website. My computer was listed as “32-bit”, and I want an installer compatible with Python 3, so I’ll click the second link that says “Miniconda3 Linux 32-bit”. Choose the link that matches your Python version and the number of bits you saw on your computer in step 1.

3. Now, we’ll need to move the installer we downloaded from our “Downloads” folder into our “Linux files” folder so we can access it in our terminal. Start by opening your “Downloads” folder and finding the installer file.

4. Click on the installer file and drag it onto the “Linux files” folder. This will move the file into “Linux files” and make it accessible to us in our terminal.

5. Now, we’ll need to open our terminal. If we type in ls to list the contents of the folder, we should see our installer.

   yourusername@penguin:~$ ls
   Miniconda3-latest-Linux-x86.sh
   
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   Run the installer using the bash command:

   yourusername@penguin:~$ sudo bash Miniconda3-latest-Linux-x86.sh
   
   Welcome to Miniconda3 4.5.12
   
   In order to continue the installation process, please review the license agreement.
   Please, press ENTER to continue
   >>>
   
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   If you see an error message instead of this greeting, you installed the wrong version of the installer. Please double-check your Python version and if your computer is 32 or 64-bit.

6. Press ENTER until you see the prompt to accept the license terms. You will type “yes”.

   Do you accept the license terms? [yes|no]
   [no] >>> yes
   
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7. The installer will ask you where you want to install Miniconda3. You can press ENTER to accept the default location.

   Miniconda3 will now be installed in this location
   /root/miniconda3
   
   - Press ENTER to confirm the location
   - Press CTRL-C to abort the installation
   - Or specify a different location below
   
   [root/miniconda3] >>>
   
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   If you have attempted this installation already and it failed, you might need to remove the already existing /root/miniconda directory. You can do this with the command rm command. Be very careful with this command - you don’t want to accidentally delete your root directory!

   yourusername@penguin:~$ sudo rm -rf /root/miniconda3
   
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8. Continue following the prompts until the installation is complete! If the installation failed after you typed in the directory name, it’s possible you cannot install Miniconda system. Return to the “Using pip“ section to install Jupyter Notebook.

9. If the installation completes successfully, you can now install Jupyter Notebook using the conda command.

   yourusername@penguin:~$ sudo conda install jupyter
   
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Once complete, we can check that Jupyter Notebook was successfully installed by running jupyter notebook from a Terminal. This will start up the Jupyter Notebook server, print out some information about the notebook server in the console, and open up a new browser tab to http://localhost:8888.

Now you’ve successfully installed Jupyter Notebook on your Chromebook! Next, read our article on how to use it.

Programming Locally

While there are some limitations to programming locally on your Chromebook, you can still program in many languages.

The following articles will help you set up a specific language or tool on your Chromebook:

• Programming in Python on a Chromebook
• Installing IDLE on a Chromebook
• Web Programming on a Chromebook