Configure a first cell by default in Jupyter notebooks

Question

TIs there a way to configure a default first cell for a specific python kernel in the Jupyter notebook? I agree that default python imports go against good coding practices.

Answer 1

Go there:

~/.ipython/profile_default/startup/

You can read the README:

This is the IPython startup directory

.py and .ipy files in this directory will be run prior to any code or files specified via the exec_lines or exec_files configurables whenever you load this profile.

Files will be run in lexicographical order, so you can control the execution order of files with a prefix, e.g.::

00-first.py
50-middle.py
99-last.ipy

So you just need to create a file there like 00_imports.py which contains:

import numpy as np

if you want to add stuff like %matplotlib inline use .ipy, which you can use directly as well.

Alternatively, there seems to exist another solution with notebook extension, but I don't know how it works, see here for the github issue of the topic: https://github.com/jupyter/notebook/issues/640

HTH