Tutorial Notebooks

How to use the Tutorial Notebooks

The best way to learn how to use a Jupyter Notebook is to open the first of the Rubin/LSST tutorial notebooks which are provided in each user’s home directory, specifically within “~/notebooks/tutorial-notebooks”.

The “notebooks/tutorial-notebooks” directory is read-only: The read-only “notebooks/tutorial-notebooks” directory will always contain the most up-to-date versions of the tutorials. Notebooks can be edited and executed in this directory, but changes cannot be saved to this directory. Users wishing to edit, execute, and save versions of these notebooks should copy them to a different path in their home directory.

How to obtain an editable version of a tutorial notebook: The commands below demonstrate how to create a copy of a tutorial notebook in the home directory which can be opened, edited, and saved. Step-by-step, the commands below change directory (cd) into the home directory (~), copy (cp) the desired tutorial (notebooks/tutorial-notebooks/<filename>.ipynb) into the current directory (.), list (ls) the files that are in the current directory to confirm the copy worked, and list in long format all attributes in human-readable form (-lah) for the copied file. The standard output -r--r--r-- indicates that the file is read-only (r) by the user, the group, and everyone with access to the file (the three r). Change the permissions of the file (chmod) to add user write access (u+w), and repeat the list command (ls -lah) for the file to see that the user now has read and write access (-rw-r--r--).

The dollar signs indicate terminal command line executable statements that should be copy-pasted into the terminal (but do not copy-paste the $). Lines without dollar signs indicate standard output to be compared with the results in the terminal.

$ cd ~
$ cp notebooks/tutorial-notebooks/<filename>.ipynb .
$ ls <filename>*
<filename>.ipynb
$ ls -lah <filename>.ipynb
-r--r--r-- 1 melissagraham melissagraham 37K Nov 13 21:14 <filename>.ipynb
$ chmod u+w <filename>.ipynb
$ ls -lah <filename>.ipynb
-rw-r--r-- 1 melissagraham melissagraham 37K Nov 13 21:14 <filename>.ipynb

After executing the above statements, use the left menu bar to navigate to the home directory and open the newly altered version of the introductory notebook, make a change, and notice that it can be saved.