How to view Jupyter notebooks

If you wish to run a Jupyter notbook on your virtual machine, you can easily view it in your web browser, on your local machine, via ssh port forwarding/tunnelling.

Port forwarding

When launching a jupyter notebook server, it will typically be run on port 8888. We can forward this port on the remote machine to a port on our local machine. In this case, we will use port 8000 of our local machine.

Let's connect to our instance again, but this time type

$ ssh -L 8000:localhost:8888 nectar

where the -L option specifies the ports to connect i.e. creates a tunnel. You shouldn't see anything different to when you connected previously.

Now launch a Jupyter notebook on the remote machine

$ jupyter notebook --no-browser --port=8888

We specify the port to be sure that it is the same as the one that we setup our ssh tunnel with, and we requested no web browser, since the remote machine (typically) doesn't have one.

This will produce some output. Take note of the token that gets generated (it should be a long string of letters and numbers).

Viewing the notebook

Open up a web browser and navigate to http://localhost:8000. This should bring up jupyter notebook, but it will request you enter the token before you can continue.

Alternatively, you can append the token to the end of the url like so http://localhost:8000/?token=YOUR_TOKEN, where you should replace YOUR_TOKEN with your token.