The kernel gateway is a web server that supports different mechanisms for spawning and communicating with Jupyter kernels, such as:

• A Jupyter Notebook server-compatible HTTP API used for requesting kernels and talking the Jupyter kernel protocol with the kernels over Websockets
• A HTTP API defined by annotated notebook cells that maps HTTP verbs and resources to code to execute on a kernel

The server launches kernels in its local process/filesystem space. It can be containerized and scaled out using common technologies like tmpnb, Cloud Foundry, and Kubernetes.

• Attach a local Jupyter Notebook server to a compute cluster in the cloud running near big data (e.g., interactive gateway to Spark)
• Enable a new breed of non-notebook web clients to provision and use kernels (e.g., web dashboards using jupyter-js-services)
• Create microservices from notebooks using the Kernel Gateway notebook-http mode

See the Features page in the documentation for a list of the Jupyter Kernel Gateway features.

Detailed installation instructions are located in the Getting Started page of the project docs. Here's a quick start using pip:

# install from pypi
pip install jupyter_kernel_gateway

# show all config options
jupyter kernelgateway --help-all

# run it with default options
jupyter kernelgateway

The Development page includes information about setting up a development environment and typical developer tasks.