Running ruby on Jupiter notebooks

Missed me? Don’t worry - I’m back, and I’d like to share an awesome thing I’ve found today.

You’ve maybe heard about Jupyter notebooks - an awesome web application which allows you to run python code in a browser. There are another similar project - Livebook which allow running Elixir code in browser.

But what to do if you are a ruby developer and irb and pry is not enough for you? Fortunately, with iruby gem you can run ruby code in Jupyter notebooks. So, lets start.

Firstly, you need to install Jupyter notebooks if it isn’t installed yet on your laptop.

Install python 3. Let’s check our versions

❯ python3 --version
Python 3.10.9
❯ pip3 --version
pip 22.3.1 from /Users/alec/Library/Python/3.10/lib/python/site-packages/pip (python 3.10)

Looks good. You maybe need to update installed packages.

❯ pip3 install --upgrade pip
Requirement already satisfied: pip in ./Library/Python/3.10/lib/python/site-packages (22.3.1)

Then install Jupyter

❯ pip3 install jupyter
Requirement already satisfied: jupyter in /usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages (1.0.0)
Requirement already satisfied: jupyter-console in /usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages (from jupyter) (6.4.4)
Requirement already satisfied: ipykernel in /usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages (from jupyter) (6.19.4)
Requirement already satisfied: nbconvert in /usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages (from jupyter) (7.2.7)
Requirement already satisfied: qtconsole in /usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages (from jupyter) (5.4.0)
Requirement already satisfied: ipywidgets in /usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages (from jupyter) (8.0.4)
...................

Let’s check our installation

❯ jupyter notebook
[I 22:51:29.176 NotebookApp] Serving notebooks from local directory: /Users/alec
[I 22:51:29.176 NotebookApp] Jupyter Notebook 6.5.2 is running at:
[I 22:51:29.176 NotebookApp] http://localhost:8888/?token=1234567890
[I 22:51:29.176 NotebookApp] or http://127.0.0.1:8888/?token=1234567890
[I 22:51:29.176 NotebookApp] Use Control-C to stop this server and shut down all kernels (twice to skip confirmation).
[C 22:51:29.182 NotebookApp]

    To access the notebook, open this file in a browser:
        file:///Users/alec/Library/Jupyter/runtime/nbserver-11401-open.html
    Or copy and paste one of these URLs:
        http://localhost:8888/?token=1234567890
     or http://127.0.0.1:8888/?token=1234567890

Now you can open your browser and check - it should work now.

Well, let’s add support for ruby. Install iruby gem

❯ gem install iruby
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
Successfully installed iruby-0.7.4
1 gem installed

Then add it to Jupyter

❯ iruby register --force

That’s it. Just restart Jupyter, and now you can run ruby code.

Let’s try to write something in ruby

Well, it works! Awesome :)

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Running ruby on Jupiter notebooks

Alexey Poimtsev

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