How to run Jupyter Notebook inside Python virtualenv

Yesterday I came across a problem where Langchain ran into some issues with my globally installed Pydantic and hence, I wasn’t able to run the code I had written to leverage LLM. So this is an article detailing how you can run Jupyter Notebook inside a Python virtualenv. I am assuming you already have Jupyter Notebook installed.

Step 1 - Initialize virtualenv

Go to the directory where you want to run Jupyter from and create a virtual environment.

python3 -m venv .venv

Activate the environment

source .venv/bin/activate

Step 2 - Install ipykernel

To manage the kernel, you will need to install ipykernel.

pip install ipykernel

Now to check which kernels you have, you can run jupyter kernelspec list

As you can see there is only one kernel currently configured.

Step 3 - Setup iPython kernel

Now, to install a new kernel, use this command

python -m ipykernel install --user --name notebooks --display-name "Notebooks"

This will configure a new kernel in your Jupyter Notebook. The list will now look like

If you go to the path mentioned here, you will find a kernel.json file which will contain the path to the venv file.

Step 4 - Switch to this kernel in Jupyter Notebook

Run Jupyter Notebook from the venv using

jupyter notebook

Now, open a Notebook and you can find the new kernel and switch to it.