Configuring the Jupyter Notebook

Many aspects of the Jupyter Notebook can be configured. We covered the configuration of the IPython kernel in the Mastering IPython's configuration system recipe in Chapter 1, A Tour of Interactive Computing with Jupyter and IPython. In this recipe, we show how to configure the Jupyter application and the Jupyter Notebook frontend.

How to do it...

1. Let's check whether the Jupyter Notebook configuration file already exists:

   >>> %ls ~/.jupyter/jupyter_notebook_config.py
   ~/.jupyter/jupyter_notebook_config.py

   If it does not, type !jupyter notebook --generate-config -y in the notebook. If the file already exists, this command will delete its contents and replace it with the default file.

   Note

   A Jupyter configuration file may exist in Python or in JSON (the same location and filename, but different file extension). JSON files have a higher priority. Unlike Python files, JSON files may be edited programmatically.

2. We can inspect the contents of the file...