How to install Jupyter Notebook on Mac using Homebrew

This tutorial explains how to install, run, and use Jupyter Notebooks on MAC.

What Is A Jupyter Notebook?

In this case, “notebook” or “notebook documents” denote documents that contain both code and rich text elements, such as figures, links, equations, … Because of the mix of code and text elements, these documents are the ideal place to bring together an analysis description, and its results, as well as, they can be executed perform the data analysis in real time.

The Jupyter Notebook App produces these documents.

For now, you should know that “Jupyter” is a loose acronym meaning Julia, Python, and R. These programming languages were the first target languages of the Jupyter application, but nowadays, the notebook technology also supports many other languages

The steps below shows how to install Jupyter:

Step 0 — Install Homebrew

The simplest way to install various Unix tools and open source projects onto Mac is via a package manager. Unfortunately, Mac doesn’t offer one by default so we’ll use Homebrew

xCode command line tools:

Install Mac OS X command line tools so that you can then install the Homebrew package manager.

Open up Terminal and type:

xcode-select --install

Double Check your work

If you see terminal respond back with a path to “CommandLineTools”, then you’re good to go.

xcode-select -p

Install Homebrew

Please paste this into Terminal.

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Step 1 — Install pyenv

Mac Os X come with Pythong 2.7 pre-installed but many Machine Learning packages are progressing to Python 3.x. Therefore, it’s recommended you start using Python 3 and the best way to do that is to first install pyenv version manager. This will allow you to install any version of Python you'd like.

First update Homebrew package manager.

brew update && brew doctor

Install pyenv version manager.

brew install pyenv

Step 2 — Install Python

Install Python 3.x using pyenv. You can see a list of version from Python Website.

pyenv install -l | grep -ow [0-9].[0-9].[0-9]

pyenv install 3.x.x

Double check your work.

pyenv versions

You’ll also need to configure your ~/.bash_profile.

echo 'eval "$(pyenv init -)"' >> ~/.bash_profile

Step 3 — Set Python to Local or Global

If you only want to use Python 3.x for a specific project, then cd to your specific directory and type:

pyenv local 3.x.x

If you’d prefer to just have Python 3.x installed globally throughout your operating system, then type:

pyenv global 3.x.x

Step 4 — Install Jupyter

Jupyter is an acronym for Julia, Python and R but these days, other languages are also included such as Ruby.

brew install jupyter

Step 5 — Start Jupyter

Now it’s time to start the jupyter notebook.

jupyter notebook