Getting Started

This guide will help you get up and running with the course notebooks using JupyterLab, assuming you’ve already installed the necessary software as per our installation instructions.

Launching the Notebooks¶

Follow these steps to start exploring the course content through interactive Jupyter notebooks:

1. Access the code: Ensure you’ve forked the GitHub repository to your local machine.

2. Navigate to the repository:

   Windows Users

   1. On Windows, open a Miniforge Prompt by searching for “miniforge” in the task bar.

   2. Change to the directory where you cloned the repository by using cd <drive:\path\to\dir>. If you installed the GitHub client using their default settings you may run cd%userprofile%\Documents\GitHub\CoastalCodeBook.

   Unix-like Systems (Mac and Linux)

   1. On Mac, search for terminal or iterm in Spotlight (command + space). On linux, the hotkey to open a terminal is “cntrl + shift + t”.

   2. You can navigate the terminal using cd, which stands for “change directory”. So you would do something like cd ~/path/to/cloned/repository

3. Activate Your Environment: Activate your coastalcodebook environment with the command below. This environment contains all the packages you’ll need.

   mamba activate coastalcodebook

4. Start JupyterLab: JupyterLab is an interactive development environment that allows you to work with notebooks and other files. Run the following command to open JupyterLab in your web browser:

   jupyter lab

5. Open a Notebook: Within JupyterLab, navigate to the notebooks directory, and open a notebook, such as 1a_tectonic_classification.ipynb.

6. Select the Right Kernel: Before running the notebook, ensure the coastalcodebook environment is selected as the kernel. You can change this in the upper-right corner by selecting Python [conda env:coastal] from the kernel dropdown menu. Update: we have now set it up so that the kernel display name is “Python 3 (ipykernel)”.

7. Interact with the Notebook: You’re now ready to execute the notebook cells and engage with the interactive coastal computational notebooks!

New to JupyterLab?¶

If JupyterLab is new to you, or you’d like a refresher, consider browsing through this introductory guide. It provides a comprehensive overview of the JupyterLab interface and features.