Tired of typing the same lines at the beginning of every Ipython notebook? Use some %load magic!

I find myself typing the same lines at the top of of almost every Ipython/Jupyter notebook I create. I import numpy, pandas, matplotlib, etc. and set some other defaults. There had to be a better way of doing this! Thats where the %load magic comes in. I created a file jupyter_imports.py with my standard imports:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib inline

# make plots look nice
plt.rcParams['font.size'] = 14
plt.rcParams['axes.labelsize'] = 'large'
plt.rcParams['xtick.labelsize'] = 'large'
plt.rcParams['ytick.labelsize'] = 'large'
plt.rcParams['lines.linewidth'] = 3

Then when I create a new notebook, I simply use

%load jupyter_imports.py

One worry I had with this method is that it would make it harder to share notebooks, since other people would not have my jupyter_imports.py file. But no problem! When the %load is executed the 1st time, it actually pastes in the contents, and comments out the %load line:

# %load /Users/Andy/jupyter_imports.py
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib inline

# make plots look nice
plt.rcParams['font.size'] = 14
plt.rcParams['axes.labelsize'] = 'large'
plt.rcParams['xtick.labelsize'] = 'large'
plt.rcParams['ytick.labelsize'] = 'large'

There are other ways of editing your jupyter notebook config files to include lines at startup, but I like this method. It’s simple (easier than figuring out how to edit your jupyter configs), and you could even have different setups for types of analyses you are doing.