What is a Jupyter Notebook?

Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text. Uses include: data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, data visualization, machine learning, and much more.

What is JupyterHub?

JupyterHub brings the power of notebooks to groups of users. It gives users access to computational environments and resources without burdening the users with installation and maintenance tasks. Users - including students, researchers, and data scientists - can get their work done in their own workspaces on shared resources which can be managed efficiently by system administrators.

Who can use this service?

This JupyterHub service is open to UCB instructors and students; as this is a proof-of-concept service, students should ensure they are backing up their notebooks regularly if they are using this service for course activities.

How do I distribute course content to students?

We recommend using nbgitpuller to distribute content to students. You can construct a nbgitpuller link, and send it to your students. When they click it, the course content will be pulled into their home directories, and the appropriate file will be opened.

Can I run RStudio?

Yes you can! R is supported on r.datahub.berkeley.edu. It is installed and enabled by default. You can also run JupyterLab, or even a Linux Desktop on your browser.

What packages & libraries are available?

This JupyterHub comes with Python 3.8 and R 4.0 installed. Many commonly used packages are pre-installed. This requirements.txt file lists the python packages installed, while this install.R file lists the R packages installed.

Can I install my own packages?

Yes, you can! In a Jupyter Notebook, you can use !pip install package-name or !conda install package-name to install a Python package. With R, you can use install.packages(). To prevent individual user environments diverging from each other too much, your user installed packages only last the length of your server. So we recommend putting those package installation lines in the beginning of the notebook / file that you are using, so it can be run each time as necessary.

Can a package be installed for all my students?

Most likely! Please open a GitHub Issue with your request. Even better, make a pull request with changes to the requirements.txt file (for Python packages) and install.R file for R packages.

I have many other questions!

Awesome! Please open an issues and we will help answer them!