Using as a command line tool

The command-line syntax to run the nbconvert script is:

$ jupyter nbconvert --to FORMAT notebook.ipynb

This will convert the Jupyter notebook file notebook.ipynb into the output format given by the FORMAT string.

Default output format - HTML

The default output format is HTML, for which the --to argument may be omitted:

$ jupyter nbconvert notebook.ipynb

Supported output formats

The currently supported output formats are:

Jupyter also provides a few templates for output formats. These can be specified via an additional --template argument and are listed in the sections below.

HTML

  • --to html

    • --template full (default)

      A full static HTML render of the notebook. This looks very similar to the interactive view.

    • --template basic

      Simplified HTML, useful for embedding in webpages, blogs, etc. This excludes HTML headers.

LaTeX

  • --to latex

    Latex export. This generates NOTEBOOK_NAME.tex file, ready for export.

    • --template article (default)

      Latex article, derived from Sphinx’s howto template.

    • --template report

      Latex report, providing a table of contents and chapters.

    • --template basic

      Very basic latex output - mainly meant as a starting point for custom templates.

    Note

    nbconvert uses pandoc to convert between various markup languages, so pandoc is a dependency when converting to latex or reStructuredText.

PDF

  • --to pdf

    Generates a PDF via latex. Supports the same templates as --to latex.

Reveal.js HTML slideshow

  • --to slides

    This generates a Reveal.js HTML slideshow. It must be served by an HTTP server. The easiest way to do this is adding --post serve on the command-line. The serve post-processor proxies Reveal.js requests to a CDN if no local Reveal.js library is present. To make slides that don’t require an internet connection, just place the Reveal.js library in the same directory where your_talk.slides.html is located, or point to another directory using the --reveal-prefix alias.

Markdown

  • --to markdown

    Simple markdown output. Markdown cells are unaffected, and code cells indented 4 spaces.

reStructuredText

  • --to rst

    Basic reStructuredText output. Useful as a starting point for embedding notebooks in Sphinx docs.

    Note

    nbconvert uses pandoc to convert between various markup languages, so pandoc is a dependency when converting to latex or reStructuredText.

Executable script

  • --to script

    Convert a notebook to an executable script. This is the simplest way to get a Python (or other language, depending on the kernel) script out of a notebook. If there were any magics in an Jupyter notebook, this may only be executable from a Jupyter session.

    For example, to convert a Julia notebook to a Julia executable script:

    jupyter nbconvert --to script my_julia_notebook.ipynb
    

Notebook and preprocessors

  • --to notebook

    New in version 3.0.

    This doesn’t convert a notebook to a different format per se, instead it allows the running of nbconvert preprocessors on a notebook, and/or conversion to other notebook formats. For example:

    jupyter nbconvert --to notebook --execute mynotebook.ipynb
    

This will open the notebook, execute it, capture new output, and save the result in mynotebook.nbconvert.ipynb. By default, nbconvert will abort conversion if any exceptions occur during execution of a cell. If you specify --allow-errors (in addition to the --execute flag) then conversion will continue and the output from any exception will be included in the cell output.

The following command:

jupyter nbconvert --to notebook --nbformat 3 mynotebook

will create a copy of mynotebook.ipynb in mynotebook.v3.ipynb in version 3 of the notebook format.

If you want to convert a notebook in-place, you can specify the ouptut file to be the same as the input file:

jupyter nbconvert --to notebook mynb --output mynb

Be careful with that, since it will replace the input file.

Note

nbconvert uses pandoc to convert between various markup languages, so pandoc is a dependency when converting to latex or reStructuredText.

The output file created by nbconvert will have the same base name as the notebook and will be placed in the current working directory. Any supporting files (graphics, etc) will be placed in a new directory with the same base name as the notebook, suffixed with _files:

$ jupyter nbconvert notebook.ipynb
$ ls
notebook.ipynb   notebook.html    notebook_files/

For simple single-file output, such as html, markdown, etc., the output may be sent to standard output with:

$ jupyter nbconvert --to markdown notebook.ipynb --stdout

Converting multiple notebooks

Multiple notebooks can be specified from the command line:

$ jupyter nbconvert notebook*.ipynb
$ jupyter nbconvert notebook1.ipynb notebook2.ipynb

or via a list in a configuration file, say mycfg.py, containing the text:

c = get_config()
c.NbConvertApp.notebooks = ["notebook1.ipynb", "notebook2.ipynb"]

and using the command:

$ jupyter nbconvert --config mycfg.py