Jupyter notebook, wrong sys.path and sys.executable

Question

I'm trying to run the anaconda distribution of python libraries in a Jupyter Notebook, but when I run the notebook I keep getting ImportErrors because the python path is set to the default distribution from Mac OS X 10.11

When I print out the sys.path and sys.executable, they differ when running python vs running jupyter notebook. For example,

from pprint import pprint as p
import sys

p(sys.path)

After doing this in python I get the correct output:

['',
 '/Users/glennraskovich/anaconda2/lib/python27.zip',
 '/Users/glennraskovich/anaconda2/lib/python2.7',
 '/Users/glennraskovich/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/plat-darwin',
 '/Users/glennraskovich/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/plat-mac',
 '/Users/glennraskovich/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/plat-mac/lib-scriptpackages',
 '/Users/glennraskovich/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/lib-tk',
 '/Users/glennraskovich/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/lib-old',
 '/Users/glennraskovich/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload',
 '/Users/glennraskovich/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/site-packages',
 '/Users/glennraskovich/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/site-packages/aeosa']

But when running this in jupyter notebook I get:

['',
 '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/dask-0.11.0-py2.7.egg',
 '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/networkx-1.11-py2.7.egg',
 '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/six-1.10.0-py2.7.egg',
 '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Pillow-3.3.1-py2.7-macosx-10.11-x86_64.egg',
 '/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.12/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python27.zip',
 '/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.12/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7',
 '/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.12/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/plat-darwin',
 '/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.12/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/plat-mac',
 '/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.12/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/plat-mac/lib-scriptpackages',
 '/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.12/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/lib-tk',
 '/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.12/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/lib-old',
 '/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.12/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload',
 '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages',
 '/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages',
 '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/IPython/extensions',
 '/Users/glennraskovich/.ipython']

For the sys.executable,

p(sys.executable)

In python, correct output:

/Users/glennraskovich/anaconda2/bin/python

But in jupyter notebook, sys.executable is not set to the anaconda version

/usr/local/opt/python/bin/python2.7

I've tried setting PATH in my .bashrc and .bash_profile, and using the commands which python, which jupyter and such show anaconda paths but jupyter notebook is not using the anaconda paths. What could be the issue here?

Answer 1

I figured out the solution, since the kernel was set to use the default mac os x's python I fixed it by using the commands

python2 -m pip install ipykernel

python2 -m ipykernel install --user

Answer 2

For me, I installed Jupyter after creating an environment, but then was trying to run a module installed from the base env. I found by "jupyter kernelspec list" (https://github.com/jupyter/notebook/issues/2563), my kernel.json at C:\Users\username\Anaconda37\share\jupyter\kernels\python3\kernel.json was pointing to the python.exe in my working env. Changed the path and solved it.

This was an exhaustive description of python path setting.