what is the ipython notebook "Terminals" menu option

Question

I am running ipython notebook on my OSX machine and/or my ubuntu 14.04 machine. I am using ipython 3.0.0, and ipython (jupyter) notebooks.

When I start an ipython notebook, under New there is a terminal option, but it's unavailable for me. I haven't been able to find any documentation on this feature, how to activate it or what it does. The ipython notebook --help command doesn't mention it and I haven't found anything in the documentation either. I haven't discovered the special keywords to search google for to get any information either.

What does this feature do? How do I activate it? Is there any documentation on this available?

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I only get "New Notebook" button in the upper-right corner of the ipython-notebooks web interface. What set of IPython/Jupiter addons are you using? AFAICS, there's no separate "jupiter notebook", jupiter extends ipython's functionality. — ivan_pozdeev, Mar 13 '15 at 23:36
I hate asking "what does this do?" questions on SO, but I cannot find a shred of documentation on this anywhere.... — Greg Samson, Mar 13 '15 at 23:59
For OSS, there's always the most detailed documentation possible called "source code" ;-) — ivan_pozdeev, Mar 14 '15 at 00:13

score 14 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 18 '15 at 18:09

14

IPython/Jupyter appears to support browser-based interactive terminal sessions. This is enabled on my machine by installing the terminado package with pip or conda. This fixes the "Terminals Unavailable" message on the drop-down, and lets me start up a (bash) terminal session in a new tab.

See this commit: IPython on GitHub

answered Mar 18 '15 at 18:09

Brendan Smithyman

179
4

1

Installed jupyter and terminado using pip, but still can't access terminals (Win). – Czarek Tomczak Mar 06 '16 at 16:14
1

Exactly the same with me - annaconda distribution used - although I used pip for the terminado (as no conda install available) – whytheq May 25 '16 at 10:35
@CzarekTomczak did you find an answer? – whytheq May 25 '16 at 10:36
ignore me - looks like because I'm using windows this feature is not available – whytheq May 25 '16 at 12:05
2

@whytheq Terminals are not supported on Windows – Czarek Tomczak May 25 '16 at 15:21
It will work on windows if you happen to have a msys2/cygwin environment with minimum python installed. and activate your usual virtual env, reinstall and launch notebook/jupyterlab from there. – Ben Oct 08 '17 at 10:08

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 13 '15 at 23:58

Here's the code in Lib/site-packages/IPython/html/notebookapp.py responsible for this item (located the file by searching the source for "Terminals" case-sensitively):

def init_terminals(self):
    try:
        from .terminal import initialize
        initialize(self.web_app)
        self.web_app.settings['terminals_available'] = True
    except ImportError as e:
        log = self.log.debug if sys.platform == 'win32' else self.log.warn
        log("Terminals not available (error was %s)", e)

As you can see, there should be a message in the console log specifying what went wrong (you may need to increase log verbosity with ipython notebook --log-level=<level> to see it). In my case, it said:

Terminals not available (error was No module named fcntl)

The html.terminal module that is being imported appears to provide a web-based IPython interactive console.

@Gomes None, `fcntl` API is UNIX-specific. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1422368/fcntl-substitute-on-windows . — ivan_pozdeev, Mar 19 '15 at 15:57
If unclear from @ivan_pozdeev comment, the browser terminal feature is not available from Windows. See [Jupyter/notebook issue #172](https://github.com/jupyter/notebook/issues/172). — Mark Mikofski, Jul 31 '15 at 20:15

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 11 '18 at 00:38

1

Support for Windows terminals with terminado dependency was added in Jupyter 5.3.0:

https://github.com/jupyter/notebook/pull/3087

answered Jan 11 '18 at 00:38

denfromufa

5,610
13
81
138

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 23 '18 at 11:06

1

Actually it's jupyter notebook 5.3.0, not jupyter. the two versions is not the same thing. - jupyter --version - jupyter notebook --version

I ever suffered from this.

answered Jan 23 '18 at 11:06

Danceiny

21
3

what is the ipython notebook "Terminals" menu option

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