How can I open a Notebook with Ipython Notebook/ Jupyter without starting a kernel?

Question

Let us assume, I want to open a notebook (i.e. with my local Jupyter instance) but I do not want to start the associated kernel (i.e. Python) with it. How can I do this?

Possible use cases:

• I just want to the the notebook output from former calculations. I do not want to do further computations.
• I want to quickly glance at it, without waiting for the kernel to start up.

To my understanding, all LaTeX rendering, JavaScript and CSS should work independent of the kernel. It should then just show me, that the kernel is not connected. I may then decide to start the kernel via the menu.

I did not find this documented anywhere.

I do not want to use nbviewer, since I want it to be integrated as much as possible in my normal Jupyter workflow.

Answer 1

I don't use Jupyter, only the last version of IPython before the big split, but when I try to open a notebook with a bogus kernel associated with it, IPython offers me to open it "without Kernel". So, the functionality exists, but it's not directly accessible AFAIK.

So I guess you just have to edit the .ipynb file manually (or write a script to do this) and change the global metadata field to something like this to achieve your goal:

"metadata": {
  "kernelspec": {
   "display_name": "bogus",
   "language": "bogus",
   "name": "bogus"
  },
  "language_info": {
   "codemirror_mode": "<don't change this>",
   "mimetype": "text/plain",
   "name": "bogus"
  }
}

It's only a partial workaround, but it seems to work in all cases. You still need to have the right codemirror configuration in your system.

An alternative would be to write a small kernel that does nothing (like the "Echo Kernel"), but that would be less effective, as you would still need a way of specify different modes of syntax highlighting (except if you only intend to write IPython notebooks).