Use cases

1. You want to split up your notebook into multiple files.

   • Simply create a file "index.ipynb" in the directory where the files will be.

   • When you open a file in this directory, it will share the same session (same running kernel) as all the others

   • Note if the url path of the file you open is originally

       http://<hostname>:<port>/notebooks/<projectpath>/<file>.ipynb
     

     then brower address bar will be changed to

       http://<hostname>:<port>/notebooks/<projectpath>/index.ipynb=<projectpath>/<file>.ipynb
     

     and the browser window will title change to "<projectdir>:<file>"

2. You have some common files that you want to share among multiple projects (i.e. in multiple notebook directories).

   • You can open the common file using url path:

       <projectpath>/index.ipynb=<commonutilpath>/<utilfile>.ipynb
     

   • The utilfile.ipynb page will run in the same kernel.

   • The simple way to make this url path is to use a relative path from within a Markdown cell in the index.ipynb. Use this Markdown link:

       [utilfile](../commonutildir/utilfile)
     

3. You have a website full of documentation notebooks, and you want your readers to browse the documentation without first downloading all the documentation files.

   • First, create index.pynb file, with http:// links to the documentation notebooks on your website. The format of the links will be:

       <basedocpath>/index.ipynb=http://<yourwebsite>/<docpath>/<docfile>.ipynb
     

   • Then your users can choose to download the index.ipynb, and open it in their local jupyter.

   • Alternatively, you can put your index.ipynb file on a hosted jupyter environment (such as Binder), and have your users open the link to index.ipynb running on that environment.

New behavior

In any of the 3 use cases:

• the window url for these notebooks will be

        http://<host>:<port>/notebooks/<projectpath>/index.ipynb=<notebookurl>
  

• all lrunning notebooks with the same <projectpath>/index.ipynb= will run within the same kernel

• the window title for these notebooks will be "projectdir:notebookname"

Installation

!pip install jupyter_share_session

Add the following line to ~/.jupyter/jupyter_notebook_config.json:

    {
      "NotebookApp": {
    ...
        "nbserver_extensions": {
    ...
          "jupyter_share_session": true
        }
      }
    }

Example notebooks

TBD

Issues

1. The implementation is necessarily fragile and dependent on implementation details of Jupyter notebook.
   • It would be better if this behavior was included in JupyterLab directly, or there would be cleaner hooks to implement this as an extension.

• Integration with mybinder.org
• Conda installation?
• Integration with jupyter_contrib_extensions?
• Integration with jupyter_cms?