Skip to content
Intuitions by Hamidreza Saghir

data science

How to work with Jupyter Notebook on a remote machine (Linux)

I typically use my computers at home to connect to my work computer. I setup xRDP to remote desktop into my work computer(Linux) which is OK but slow at times depending on the…

· 2 min read

The short version. Run jupyter notebook --no-browser --port=8889 on the remote machine, open an SSH tunnel that forwards a local port to 8889 on the remote, and point your local browser at http://localhost:8888. Full steps and copy-paste commands below.

I typically use my computers at home to connect to my work computer. I setup xRDP to remote desktop into my work computer (Linux) which is OK but slow at times depending on the Internet connection. Since I usually use Jupyter notebook, I wanted to be able to run a Jupyter notebook server on my work computer and access it from my home computer browser. I did some search on the Internet and found a method that works, thought I’d share it here.

  1. Open an SSH tunnel that forwards the port setup for Jupyter Notebook on the remote machine to a port on the local machine so that we can access it using our local browser
hamid@local_host$ ssh user@remote_host

user@remote_host$ jupyter notebook --no-browser --port=8889

This runs a jupyter notebook server on the remote machine on port:8889 without opening a browser since we will use the browser on our local machine to connect to this.

  1. In a new terminal window on your local machine, SSH into the remote machine again using the following options to setup port forwarding.
hamid@local_host$ ssh -N -L localhost:8888:localhost:8889 user@remote_host

-N options tells SSH that no commands will be run and it’s useful for port forwarding, and -L lists the port forwarding configuration that we setup.

  1. Access the remote jupyter server via your local browser. Open your browser and go to:
localhost:8888

To close the SSH tunnel simply do ctrl-c.

Windows

  • If you are using windows on your home computer but have linux on your remote machine, you can use putty to ssh into your work computer.

  • Download putty

  • set ssh connection:

    • Host Name: user@IP
    • port: 22

  • set putty/connections/SSH/tunnels

    • source: local port: 8888
    • Destination: localhost:8889