Using Jupyter Notebooks Without Docker?

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Hi, all!

Jill Ziegler here again from the University of Notre Dame Quark Net Center. It’s that time of year again when I have questions to ask of the community.

We are trying to figure out whether we can use Jupyter Notebooks for Open Data analysis instead of using Docker containers. This is partially for our convenience (every member of our collaboration except me is running on a Windows computer) and partially to see if we can create an even lower barrier to entry for other high school teachers to do analysis.

Based on Matt Bellis’ talk/activity on event selection in last year’s Open Data Workshop at CERN, I think we should be able to use the pip command to grab the additional libraries we need for analysis in our Notebook (we know to preceed a bash command with !). I am going to try this on my personal Windows machine (it should be non-destructive) to see if it works, but are there any reasons we should not do it that we might not know? If it doesn’t work, can we just do the WSL2 install to get the commands to work and not worry about the Docker container? Or are we likely to find that Windows computers are just obstinate and we need to install Docker?

I know this is a somewhat vague line of questioning and I can report back once I’ve had a chance to try this out on a stock Windows computer, but I also thought I’d post this up in case it was a terrible idea and in case anyone else has reasons to do something similar for really lightweight investigations.

Thanks in advance for any comments!

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Hi Jill,

I’m not sure which infrastructure you’re working with — maybe the CMS notebooks? — but if it’s any help, you’ll find that the ATLAS Open Data notebooks can run directly on mybinder or colab, so that you don’t need to use a container locally or pip install anything. I expect it’s possible to do the same with other notebooks, and that’s a super easy way to get people going.

Also, just a shameless promotion for this thing, which is even lower barrier-to-entry:

Best,
Zach

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Hey Jill!

I think you’re right. We launched jupyter from within our docker container in the CMS tutorials, but if you have it installed separately I believe pip will do the trick for other packages.

Here’s the list for our python container, I would start by trying to pip install them (except for jupyterlab, obviously)

Hope you have a productive summer,
Julie