How can I add a table of contents to a Jupyter / JupyterLab notebook?

Question

The documentation at http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/stable/interactive/notebook.html says

You can provide a conceptual structure for your computationa

Answer 1

nbextensions ToC instructions

Introduction

As @Ian and @Sergey have mentioned, nbextensions is a simple solution. To elaborate their answer, here is a few more information.

What is nbextensions?

The nbextensions contains a collection of extensions that add functionality to your Jupyter notebook.

For example, just to cite a few extensions:

• Table of Contents

  

• Collapsible headings

  

Install nbextensions

The installation can be done through Conda or PIP

# If conda:
conda install -c conda-forge jupyter_contrib_nbextensions
# or with pip:
pip install jupyter_contrib_nbextensions

You will see the new tab Nbextensions in the jupyter notebook menu. Uncheck the checkbox at the top disable configuration for nbextensions without explicit compatibility (they may break your notebook environment, but can be useful to show for nbextension development) and then check Table of Contents(2). That is all. Screenshot:

Copy js and css files

To copy the nbextensions' javascript and css files into the jupyter server's search directory, do the following:

jupyter contrib nbextension install --user

Toggle extensions

Note that if you are not familiar with the terminal, it would be better to install nbextensions configurator (see the next section)

You can enable/disable the extensions of your choice. As the documentation mentions, the generic command is:

jupyter nbextension enable 

Concretely, to enable the ToC (Table of Contents) extension, do:

jupyter nbextension enable toc2/main

Install Configuration interface (optional but useful)

As its documentation says, nbextensions_configurator provides config interfaces for nbextensions.

It looks like the following:

To install it if you use conda:

conda install -c conda-forge jupyter_nbextensions_configurator

If you don't have Conda or don't want to install through Conda, then do the following 2 steps:

pip install jupyter_nbextensions_configurator
jupyter nbextensions_configurator enable --user