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Overview

This is a short overview of the major components and steps in building a Jupyter Book. See the other pages in this guide for more in-depth information.

(start:install)=

Install Jupyter Book

You can install Jupyter Book via pip:

pip install -U jupyter-book

This will install everything you need to build a Jupyter Book locally.

The Jupyter Book command-line interface

Jupyter Book uses a command-line interface to perform a variety of actions. For example, building and cleaning books. You can run the following command to see what options are at your control:

You can also use the short-hand `jb` for `jupyter-book`. E.g.,:
`jb create mybookname`. We'll use `jupyter-book` for the rest of this guide.

% double-writing this so users aren't confused by the ! but we still get the output

jupyter-book --help
:tags: [remove-input]

!jupyter-book --help

For more complete information about the CLI, see .

The book building process

Building a Jupyter Book broadly consists of these steps:

  1. Create your book's content. You structure your book with a collection of folders, files, and configuration. See .
  2. Build your book. Using Jupyter Book's command-line interface you can convert your pages into either an HTML or a PDF book. See .
  3. Publish your book online. Once your book is built, you can share it with others. Most common is to build HTML, and host it as a public website. See .

:::{note} We will use the word "book" to describe the outputs generated by this tutorial, but you can also use Jupyter Book to build articles. See for more information. :::

(anatomy-of-a-book)=

Anatomy of a Jupyter Book

There are three things that you need in order to build a Jupyter Book:

  • A configuration file (_config.yml)
  • A table of contents file (_toc.yml)
  • Your book's content

For example, consider the following folder structure, which makes up a simple Jupyter Book.

mybookname/
├── _config.yml
├── _toc.yml
├── landing-page.md
└── page1.ipynb

We'll cover each briefly below, and you can find more information about them elsewhere in this documentation.

Book configuration (_config.yml)

All of the configuration for your book is in a YAML file called _config.yml.

You can define metadata for your book (such as its title), add a book logo, turn on different "interactive" buttons (such as a {term}Binder button for pages built from a Jupyter Notebook), and more.

For more information about your book's configuration file, see
[](../customize/config.md).

Here's an example of a simple _config.yml file:

# in _config.yml
title: "My book title"
logo: images/logo-wide.svg
execute:
  execute_notebooks: "off"
  • title: defines a title for the book. It will show up in the left sidebar.
  • logo: defines a path to an image file for your book's logo (it will also show up in the sidebar).
  • execute: contains a collection of configuration options to control execution and cacheing.
    • execute_notebooks: "off" tells Jupyter Book not to execute any computational content that it finds when building the book. By default, Jupyter Book executes and caches all book content.

:::{admonition} More about _config.yml :class: tip There is much more that you can do with the _config.yml file. For example, you can or add . For a complete list of fields for _config.yml, see . :::

Table of Contents (_toc.yml)

Jupyter Book uses your Table of Contents to define the structure of your book. For example, your chapters, sub-chapters, etc.

This is a YAML file with a collection of pages, each one linking to a file in your book. Here's an example of the two content files shown above.

If you would like to quickly **generate a basic Table of Contents** YAML file,
run the following command:

```bash
jupyter-book toc mybookname/
```

And it will generate a TOC for you. Note that there must be at least one content
file in each folder in order for any sub-folders to be parsed.

# In _toc.yml
- file: landing-page
- file: page1

Each item in the _toc.yml file points to a single file. The links should be relative to your book's folder and with no extension. Think of the top-most level of your TOC file as book chapters (excluding the landing page). The title of each chapter will be inferred from the title in your files.

The first file specifies the landing page of your book (in this case, it is a markdown file). The landing page is the highest page in your book's content hierarchy. The second file specifies a content page of your book (in this case, it is a Jupyter Notebook).

For more information about how section structure maps onto book structure,
see [](toc/structure).

:::{admonition} More about _toc.yml :class: tip You can specify more complex book configurations with your _toc.yml file. For example, you can specify parts, sections, and control custom titles. For more information about your book's table of contents file, see . :::

Book content

A collection of text files make up your book's content. These can be one of several types of files, such as markdown (.md), Jupyter Notebooks (.ipynb) or reStructuredText (.rst) files (see for a full list).

In the above example, there were two files listed: a markdown file and a Jupyter Notebook. We'll cover each in the next section.