Configure Jupyter Notebook on Raspberry PI 2 for remote access and scala kernel install

Hi,

This is a continuation of the previous article regarding Jupyter Notebook (http://log-it.tech/2017/09/02/installing-jupyter-notebook-raspberry-pi-2/) Let’s start with my modification in order to have an remote connection to it. It first needs a password in the form of password hash. To generate this pass run python cli and execute this code from IPython.lib import passwd;passwd(“your_custom_password”). Once you get the password hash, we can list the fields that i uncommented to activate minimal remote access:

c.NotebookApp.open_browser = False #do not open a browser on notebook start, you will access it by daemon remotely
c.NotebookApp.ip = '*' #permite access on every interface of the server
c.NotebookApp.password = u'[your_pass_has]' #setup password in order to access the notebook, otherwise token from server is required (if you want it this way you can get the token by running sudo systemctl status jupyter.service 

You can also add them at the bottom of the file as well. In order for the changes to take effect you will need also to perform a service restart with sudo systemctl restart jupyter.service.

You have now the basic steps to run Jupyter Notebook with the IPython 2 kernel. Now lets’s ger to the next step of installing the scala kernel(https://www.scala-lang.org).

The steps are pretty straight forward and they are taken from this link https://www.packtpub.com/mapt/book/big_data_and_business_intelligence/9781785884870/9/ch09lvl1sec65/installing-the-scala-kernel , what i tried is to put it end to end. I am not 100% sure if you need also java 8 but i installed it anyway, you will find the steps here https://www.raspinews.com/installing-oracle-java-jdk-8-on-raspberry-pi/ but what you really need to install is sbt.

The catch here is that you don’t need to search for sbt on raspberry, just drop the default one, it will do the job. The steps are listed here http://www.scala-sbt.org/release/docs/Installing-sbt-on-Linux.html. Once it is installed you can return to the link listed above and just run the steps:

apt-get install git
git clone https://github.com/alexarchambault/jupyter-scala.git
cd jupyter-scala
sbt cli/packArchive

Sbt will grab a lot of dependences, if you work with proxies i am not aware of the settings that you need to do, but you can search it and probably you find a solution. Have patience, it will take a while until it is done, but once it is done you can run ./jupyter-scala in order to install the kernel and also check if it works with jupyter kernelspec list.

Restart the Jupyter Notebook to update it, although i am not convinced if it’s necessary 🙂
In my case i have a dynamic dns service from my internet provider but i think you can do it with a free dns provider on your router as well. An extra forward or NAT of port 8888 will be needed but once this is done you should have a playgroup in your browser that knows python and scala. Cool, isn’t it?

Cheers