Converting a Jupyter Notebook to a Python Script

You can convert a Jupyter Notebook to a Python script. This is equivalent to copying and pasting the contents of each code cell into a single .py file. The Markdown sections are also included as comments.

The conversion can be done from the NotebookApp or in the command line as follows:

jupyter nbconvert --to=python chapter-1-notebook.ipynb

This is useful, for example, when you want to determine the library requirements for a Notebook using a tool such as pipreqs. This tool determines the libraries used in a project and exports them into a requirements.txt file (and it can be installed by running pip install pipreqs).

The command is called from outside the folder containing your .py files. For example, if the .py files are inside a folder called chapter-1, you could do the following:

pipreqs chapter-1/

The resulting requirements.txt file for chapter-1-workbook.ipynb looks like this:

     cat chapter-1/requirements.txt
     matplotlib==2.0.2
     numpy==1.13.1
     pandas==0.20.3
     requests==2.18.4
     seaborn==0.8
     beautifulsoup4==4.6.0
     scikit_learn==0.19.0