Adding new Julia environment to Jupyter Notebook

I recently started adopting this programming language and play around with it. As I explore and start working on mini projects, I see the need to have separate environments as some "packages" are incompatible with each others. The language can be downloaded at https://julialang.org/. If you use Linux, your distro might already have it installed but please be aware that it is likely different version.

The Package Manager

Pkg is Julia’s built-in package manager and handles operations such as adding, updating and removing packages. Pkg has it’s own read – evaluate – print – loop (REPL). To enter the Pkg REPL, simply type the right square bracket ] from the Julia REPL.

As you can see, the REPL changes colour from green (Julia) to blue (Pkg). The (@v1.11) prefix indicates that I am in the default environment, using Julia version 1.11.x which is the latest version at time of writing. To exit Pkg REPL, simply press Backspace or ctrl-C.

Generate a Project Environment

To generate a new project environment, simply type generate followed by the name of your project. An new environment directory will be created.

In this environment the files Project.toml and Manifest.toml live that specify what packages and what versions of those packages are available in your environment. However, the default environment (@v1.11) is still active.

Activate a Project Environment

To activate your newly created project environment, type activate followed by the name of your project (directory). The prefix changes from (@v1.11)to(DMU)indicating that the project demo is active. By typing status you can see that the project is still empty (i.e. no packages added yet). To switch back to the main environment, simply use activate @v1.11. As you see, Pkg told us we were activating a new project (another word for environment), because as we saw before, no files did actually exist, yet.

There’s another shortcut to activate the main environment, which is activate without an argument.

Adding Packages

Adding packages is pretty straightforward and is done using the command add. By default the latest package version is added. Let’s add our first package. Since I will be using this environment on Jupyter Notebook, I will add the package IJulia to our project environment.

As you can see, the files Project.toml and Manifest.toml are updated to reflect the change made.

To update all packages in our project environment, use the update command.

Adding Environment to Jupyter Notebook

To add the environment to Jupyter Notebook, we return to Julia REPL and use the following script

using IJulia 
IJulia.installkernel("Julia (DMU)", "--project=@.")

replace DMU with your environment name.

Congratulations, you should now have a new Julia environment installed on the Jupyter Notebook.