Jupyter Notebooks (.ipynb files) are a community standard for communicating and performing interactive computing. They are documents that combine live runnable code with narrative text (Markdown), equations (LaTeX), images, interactive visualizations and other rich output. qBraid Lab provides an interface to create and interact with Jupyter Notebooks, and includes a number of additional key features and integrations to enhance the quantum developer’s experience.

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Create notebook

Create a notebook by clicking the + button in the file browser and then selecting a kernel in the new Launcher tab. In the Launcher tab, under Notebooks, clicking on an ipykernel associated with an activated environment will automatically launch a Jupyter notebook (.ipynb file) using that kernel.

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Switch notebook kernel

In the upper-right of any open notebook, you can see which kernel is in use. Clicking on the name of the current kernel, will open the kernel selector, and allow you switch to any other active kernel.
kernel

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Pip (magic) commands

From inside a notebook, you must run all pip commands using the “magic” % operator. For example, to install a new package from within a notebook cell, use: 
[ ] %pip install <my-package>
WARNING: Do not use the ! operator for pip install commands within Jupyter notebooks on qBraid. Doing so will install packages at the system-level, where they will not be discoverable by your current notebook environment/kernel.
After installing any new packages directly from a notebook, you must restart the kernel to see the changes take effect.

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Share notebook

Collaborate and share your work with other qBraid users via the “Share notebook” feature:
Sharing notebooks is available only in the Standard/Pro tiers. See subscriptions for more information.
  1. Open the notebook that you would like to share (see Opening files).
  2. Click File > Share Notebook
  3. Enter the email address of any another qBraid user, and click Share.
The notebook will then be copied directly into that user’s $HOME/sharedNotebooks directory in their qBraid Lab file system. This sharedNotebooks directory will be automatically created at the time the notebook is shared, if it does not already exist.
The notebook document format used in qBraid Lab is the same as in the classic Jupyter Notebook. For more on how to use Jupyter Notebooks, see Jupyter Notebooks and Jupyter Lab: Notebooks.