install ipython notebook on mac

First why you need IPython to getting started with -

- It provides interactive capability with rich architecture

- Browser based support

- Visualization

- Save your exercise capability

- High performance tool for parallel computing and statistics analysis on datasets.

How to install ipython notebook on mac -

There are various ways you can install it, and you can find so many resources online, though I try here listing down the steps which I followed.

You can follow below instruction to install it -

$ pip install readline ipython

$ sudo pip install pyzmq

$ sudo pip install jinja2

$ sudo pip install tornado

Once all those gets installed fine, run following command to check whether it installed fine or not. You can check on command prompt first by typing ipython. 

You should be able to see on command prompt if you just run ipython -

Python 2.7.1 (r271:86832, Jul 31 2011, 19:30:53)
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

IPython 1.1.0 -- An enhanced Interactive Python.
?         -> Introduction and overview of IPython's features.
%quickref -> Quick reference.
help      -> Python's own help system.
object?   -> Details about 'object', use 'object??' for extra details.

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Once it comes up fine, start notebook

$ ipython notebook --pylab=inline

and it should open browser with -

You can click on New Notebook and try out few things to check its working fine, like 1+1, or 5*5 etc.

All Set!

Other clean recommended way to install is with proper virtualenv and requirement.txt file -

Create a seperate virtual env and run following requirement.txt

numpy==1.7.1

pandas==0.11.0

python-dateutil==2.1

pytz==2013b

pyzmq==2.1.11

six==1.3.0

wsgiref==0.1.2

And install pip install -r requirement.txt

Above instruction is for mac, which is comparatively easy compared to other environments. Feel free to post comments or issues you run into while installing.