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 detailed explanation of Jupyter Kernel Gateway's features.

Detailed installation instructions can be found in the Jupyter Kernel Gateway documentation found on ReadTheDocs.

# install from pypi
pip install jupyter_kernel_gateway

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

# run it with default options
jupyter kernelgateway

Setting up a Dockerized development environment for the Jupyter Kernel Gateway is straightforward using these steps:

1. Prerequisite - Docker installation (if needed)

For example, on a Mac, do this one-time setup to set up Docker locally:

brew update

# make sure you're on Docker >= 1.7
brew install docker-machine docker
docker-machine create -d virtualbox dev
eval "$(docker-machine env dev)"

2. Clone the repo

   # make a directory under ~ to put source
   mkdir -p ~/projects
   cd !$
   
   # clone this repo
   git clone https://github.com/jupyter/kernel_gateway.git

3. Test the installation

   make test-python3
   make test-python2

4. Run the gateway server

   cd kernel_gateway
   make dev

5. Access the gateway instances:

   a. Run docker-machine ls and note the IP of the dev machine.

   b. Visit http://THAT_IP:8888/api in your browser where THAT_IP is the IP address returned from the previous step. (Note that the route /api/kernels is not enabled by default for greater security. See the --KernelGatewayApp.list_kernels parameter documentation if you would like to enable the /api/kernels route.)