Tunneling in to IPython
IPython is an easy and convenient way to edit code through a web browser. If you are working on a desktop computer, you can just launch IPython and point your browser to localhost:8888. This is the port that the IPython server, Jupyter, runs on. However, if you are working on a cloud server, then a common way to work with code is to tunnel in to IPython using SSH. Tunneling in to IPython involves the following steps:
- In your SSH client, set your destination port to localhost:8888. In PuTTY, go to Connection | SSH | Tunnels.
- Set the source port to anything above 8000 to avoid conflicting with other services. Click Add. Save these settings and open the connection. Log in to your droplet as usual.
- Start the IPython server by typing jupyter notebook into Command Prompt of your server instance.
- Access IPython by pointing your browser to localhost: source port; for example, localhost:8001.
- Start the IPython server.
Note that you may need a token to access the server for the first time. This is available from the command output once you start Jupyter. You can either copy the URL given in this output directly into your browser's address bar, changing the port address to your local source port address, for example: 8001, or you can elect to paste the token, the part after token=, into the Jupyter start-up page and replace it with a password for future convenience. You now should be able to open, run, and save IPython notebooks.