Contents

Overview and installation

This is a guide for creating your own book using Jupyter Book. Book content is written in markdown and Jupyter Notebooks, and jupyter-book converts these into a book fit for hosting on the web or a publishable PDF.

Install the command-line interface

First off, make sure you have the CLI installed so that you can work with Jupyter Book. The Jupyter-Book CLI allows you to build and control your Jupyter Book. You can install it via pip with the following command:

pip install -U jupyter-book

A note for Windows users

Jupyter Book is now also tested against Windows OS 😀

However, there is a known incompatibility for notebook execution, when using Python 3.8.

See Working on Windows

The book building process

Building a Jupyter Book broadly consists of two steps:

  1. Put your book content in a folder or a file. Jupyter Book needs the following pieces in order to build your book:

    • Your content file(s) (the pages of your book) in either markdown or Jupyter Notebooks.

    • A Table of Contents YAML file (_toc.yml) that defines the structure of your book. Mandatory when building a folder.

    • (optional) A configuration file (_config.yml) to control the behavior of Jupyter Book.

  2. Build your book. Using Jupyter Book’s command-line interface you can convert your pages into either an HTML or a PDF book.

  3. Host your book’s HTML online. Once your book’s HTML is built, you can host it online as a public website. See Publish your book online for more information.

Anatomy of a Jupyter Book

Jupyter-Book comes with a demo book so that you can see how the content files are used in the book. We’ll begin with a quick tour of these files, as they are the pieces that you’ll modify for your own book.

Running the following command will create a new Jupyter Book with a few content pages and a Table of Contents to get you started:

Note

Jupyter Book uses a command-line interface to generate books. For more complete information about the CLI, see The command-line interface.

Create a template Jupyter Book

We’ll use a small template book to show what kinds of files you might put inside your own. To create a new Jupyter Book, type the following at the command-line:

You can also use the short-hand jb for jupyter-book. E.g.,: jb create mybookname. We’ll use jupyter-book for the rest of this guide.

jupyter-book create mybookname

A new book will be created at the path that you’ve given (in this case, mybookname/).

Note

If you would like to quickly generate a basic Table of Contents YAML file, run the following command:

jupyter-book toc mybookname/

And it will generate a TOC for you. Note that there must be at least one content file in each folder in order for any sub-folders to be parsed.

Inspecting your book’s contents

Let’s take a quick look at some important files in the demo book you created:

mybookname/
├── _config.yml
├── _toc.yml
├── content.md
├── intro.md
├── markdown.md
├── notebooks.ipynb
└── references.bib

Here’s a quick rundown of the files you can modify for yourself, and that ultimately make up your book.

Book configuration

All of the configuration for your book is in the following file:

mybookname/
├── _config.yml

You can define metadata for your book (such as its title), add a book logo, turn on different “interactive” buttons (such as a Binder button for pages built from a Jupyter Notebook), and more.

For more information about your book’s configuration file, see Configure book settings.

Table of Contents

Jupyter Book uses your Table of Contents to define the structure of your book. For example, your chapters, sub-chapters, etc.

The Table of Contents lives at this location:

mybookname/
├── _toc.yml

This is a YAML file with a collection of pages, each one linking to a file in your content/ folder. Here’s an example of a few pages defined in toc.yml.

- file: features/features
  sections:
  - file: features/markdown
  - file: features/notebooks

The top-most level of your TOC file are book chapters. Above, this is the “Features” page. Note that in this case the title of the page is not explicitly specified but is inferred from the source files. This behavior is controlled by the page_titles setting in _config.yml (see Files for more details). Each chapter can have several sections (defined in sections:) and each section can have several sub-sections. For more information about how section structure maps onto book structure, see How headers and sections map onto to book structure.

Each item in the _toc.yml file points to a single file. The links should be relative to your book’s folder and with no extension.

For example, in the example above there is a file in mybookname/content/notebooks.ipynb. The TOC entry that points to this file is here:

    - file: features/notebooks

For more information about your book’s table of contents file, see Table of Contents structure.

Book content

The markdown and ipynb files in your folder is your book’s content. Some content files for the demo book are shown below:

mybookname/
...
├── content.md
└── notebooks.ipynb

Note that the content files are either Jupyter Notebooks or Markdown files. These are the files that define “sections” in your book.

You can store these files in whatever collection of folders you’d like, note that the structure of your book when it is built will depend solely on the order of items in your _toc.yml file (see below section)

Book bibliography for citations

If you’d like to build a bibliography for your book, you can do so by including the following file:

mybookname/
└── references.bib

This BiBTex file can be used to insert citations into your book’s pages. For more information, see References and citations.

Next step: build your book

Now that you’ve got a Jupyter Book folder structure, we can create the HTML (or PDF) for each of your book’s pages. That’s covered in the next section.

Books with Jupyter Build your book