juv

A little wrapper around uv to launch ephemeral Jupyter notebooks.

uvx juv
# A wrapper around uv to launch ephemeral Jupyter notebooks.
#
# Usage: juv [uvx flags] <COMMAND>[@version] [PATH]
#
# Commands:
#   init: Initialize a new notebook
#   add: Add dependencies to the notebook
#   lab: Launch notebook/script in Jupyter Lab
#   notebook: Launch notebook/script in Jupyter Notebook
#   nbclassic: Launch notebook/script in Jupyter Notebook Classic
#
# Examples:
#   juv init foo.ipynb
#   juv add foo.ipynb numpy pandas
#   juv lab foo.ipynb
#   juv nbclassic script.py
#   juv --python=3.8 [email protected] foo.ipynb

Scripts will be converted to notebooks before launching the Jupyter session.

uvx juv lab script.py # creates script.ipynb

Any flags that are passed prior to the command (e.g., uvx juv --with=polars lab) will be forwarded to uvx as-is. This allows you to specify additional dependencies, a different interpreter, etc.

what

PEP 723 (inline script metadata) allows specifying dependencies as comments within Python scripts, enabling self-contained, reproducible execution. This feature could significantly improve reproducibility in the data science ecosystem, since many analyses are shared as standalone code (not packages). However, a lot of data science code lives in notebooks (.ipynb files), not Python scripts (.py files).

juv bridges this gap by:

• Extending PEP 723-style metadata support from uv to Jupyter notebooks
• Launching Jupyter sessions with the specified dependencies

It's a simple Python script that parses the notebook and starts a Jupyter session with the specified dependencies (piggybacking on uv's existing functionality).

alternatives

juv is opinionated and might not suit your preferences. That's ok! uv is super extensible, and I recommend reading the wonderful documentation to learn about its primitives.

For example, you can achieve a similar workflow using the --with-requirements flag:

uvx --with-requirements=requirements.txt --from=jupyter-core --with=jupyterlab jupyter lab notebook.ipynb

While slightly more verbose and breaking self-containment, this approach totally works and saves you from installing another dependency.