Open IPython notebooks (*.ipynb) in read-only view (like a HTML file)

Question

Nowadays with more and more IPython notebook files (*.ipynb) around, it is very disturbing every time when I want to peek at some notebook I have to open a server for it, and ca

Answer 1

The best I can suggest - unfortunately still a bit verbose - is using nbconvert to create a HTML version of the file, then opening it with your browser. Below are commands to do this (assuming that your browser is set up as the default program to handle .html files). Just replace yournotebook.ipynb with your real Notebook name.

Linux

jupyter nbconvert --to html yournotebook.ipynb --output /tmp/notebook.html &&
xdg-open /tmp/notebook.html

macOS

jupyter nbconvert --to html yournotebook.ipynb --output /tmp/notebook.html &&
open /tmp/notebook.html

Windows

jupyter nbconvert --to html yournotebook.ipynb --output "%TEMP%\notebook.html" && start "" "%TEMP%\notebook.html"

(Note that if you want to do this in bulk, perhaps in a loop in a script, you'll probably want to modify the commands above to not always use the same filename for the HTML file, to avoid the race condition where the HTML file has been overwritten by the time the browser actually gets round to starting to read it.)