021_jupyter_venv.adoc
Edited: Thursday 1 May 2025

Add Virtual Environment to Jupyter Notebook
Jupyter Notebook makes sure that the IPython kernel is available, but you have to manually add a kernel with a different version of Python or a virtual environment. First, make sure your environment is activated with conda activate myenv. Next, install ipykernel which provides the IPython kernel for Jupyter:

pip install –user ipykernel
Next you can add your virtual environment to Jupyter by typing:

python -m ipykernel install –user –name=myenv
This should print the following:

Installed kernelspec myenv in /home/user/.local/share/jupyter/kernels/myenv
In this folder you will find a kernel.json file which should look the following way if you did everything correctly:

{
“argv”: [
“/home/user/anaconda3/envs/myenv/bin/python”,
“-m”,
“ipykernel_launcher”,
“-f”,
“{connection_file}”
],
“display_name”: “myenv”,
“language”: “python”
}
That’s all to it! Now you are able to choose the conda environment as a kernel in Jupyter. Here is what that would look like in JupyterLab:

Jupyter Virtual Environment

Remove Virtual Environment from Jupyter Notebook
After you deleted your virtual environment, you’ll want to remove it also from Jupyter. Let’s first see which kernels are available. You can list them with:

jupyter kernelspec list
This should return something like:

Available kernels:
myenv /home/user/.local/share/jupyter/kernels/myenv
python3 /usr/local/share/jupyter/kernels/python3
Now, to uninstall the kernel, you can type:

jupyter kernelspec uninstall myenv