A short guide to setup a Jupyter notebook for Ruby (on a mac, with a fish shell)

0. have Homebrew install

see https://brew.sh for instructions

0. have Ruby installed in some form

I suggest rbenv

1. download Anaconda from https://www.anaconda.com/downloads

2. install ☝️ (VS Code is optional, feel free to skip it)

3. set -g fish_user_paths /anaconda3/bin/ $fish_user_paths

4. test with jupyter notebook

• it should open a browser window to the working directory
• the next steps will add a "Ruby" option to the "New > Notebook" menu (up right)

5. install iRuby

instructions adapted from https://github.com/sciruby/iruby#homebrew

brew install automake gmp libtool wget
brew install zeromq --HEAD
brew install czmq --HEAD

set -x LIBZMQ_PATH (brew --prefix zeromq)/lib
set -x LIBCZMQ_PATH (brew --prefix czmq)/lib

gem install cztop
gem install iruby --pre
iruby register --force

6. restart your Jupyter notebook (Ctrl-C in the terminal it is running and then start it up again)

🎉

Comments

[Perry Raskin]

Hi, I'm using Bash. Followed instructions but I keep getting -bash: iruby: command not found. All other commands were successful. Any idea? Would really like to get to use Ruby on Jupyter Notebook!

[Kostas]

Hi Perry, how did step 5 play out? After gem install iruby, did you have a iruby executable in your PATH?

[Perry Raskin]

I'm not sure how to place it into my PATH. the set -x commands also did not work - -bash: syntax error near unexpected token('`

[Kostas]

Ah, yes. That’s fish-specific. For bash, export PATH /anaconda/bin $PATH. You will probably have to add this to your ~/.profile in order to persist between sessions.

[Perry Raskin]

If I'm on Mac and did not use anaconda, how should this command look?

[Kostas]

Oh, and the other set -x commands on step 5 have to be replaced with

export LIBZMQ_PATH $(brew --prefix zeromq)/lib
export LIBCZMQ_PATH $(brew --prefix czmq)/lib

[Kostas]

Oh, I’m not sure this’ll work without anaconda installed. I wrote these instructions while installing it on a Mac too.

[Perry Raskin]

got it, thanks

[alleline]

Hi,
After executing set -x LIBZMQ_PATH (brew --prefix zeromq)/lib

the terminal says:zsh: no matches found: (brew --prefix zeromq)/lib

Does anyone know how to fix that? Thanks