Important
This documentation covers IPython versions 6.0 and higher. Beginning with version 6.0, IPython stopped supporting compatibility with Python versions lower than 3.3 including all versions of Python 2.7.
If you are looking for an IPython version compatible with Python 2.7, please use the IPython 5.x LTS release and refer to its documentation (LTS is the long term support release).
Overview of the IPython configuration system¶
This section describes the IPython configuration system. This is based on
traitlets.config
; see that documentation for more information
about the overall architecture.
Configuration file location¶
So where should you put your configuration files? IPython uses “profiles” for configuration, and by default, all profiles will be stored in the so called “IPython directory”. The location of this directory is determined by the following algorithm:
If the
ipython-dir
command line flag is given, its value is used.If not, the value returned by
IPython.paths.get_ipython_dir()
is used. This function will first look at theIPYTHONDIR
environment variable and then default to~/.ipython
. Historical support for theIPYTHON_DIR
environment variable will be removed in a future release.
For most users, the configuration directory will be ~/.ipython
.
Previous versions of IPython on Linux would use the XDG config directory,
creating ~/.config/ipython
by default. We have decided to go
back to ~/.ipython
for consistency among systems. IPython will
issue a warning if it finds the XDG location, and will move it to the new
location if there isn’t already a directory there.
Once the location of the IPython directory has been determined, you need to know
which profile you are using. For users with a single configuration, this will
simply be ‘default’, and will be located in
<IPYTHONDIR>/profile_default
.
The next thing you need to know is what to call your configuration file. The
basic idea is that each application has its own default configuration filename.
The default named used by the ipython command line program is
ipython_config.py
, and all IPython applications will use this file.
The IPython kernel will load its own config file after
ipython_config.py
. To load a particular configuration file instead of
the default, the name can be overridden by the config_file
command line
flag.
To generate the default configuration files, do:
$ ipython profile create
and you will have a default ipython_config.py
in your IPython directory
under profile_default
.
Note
IPython configuration options are case sensitive, and IPython cannot catch misnamed keys or invalid values.
By default IPython will also ignore any invalid configuration files.
New in version 5.0: IPython can be configured to abort in case of invalid configuration file.
To do so set the environment variable IPYTHON_SUPPRESS_CONFIG_ERRORS
to
'1'
or 'true'
Locating these files¶
From the command-line, you can quickly locate the IPYTHONDIR or a specific profile with:
$ ipython locate
/home/you/.ipython
$ ipython locate profile foo
/home/you/.ipython/profile_foo
These map to the utility functions: IPython.paths.get_ipython_dir()
and IPython.paths.locate_profile()
respectively.
Profiles¶
A profile is a directory containing configuration and runtime files, such as logs, connection info for the parallel apps, and your IPython command history.
The idea is that users often want to maintain a set of configuration files for different purposes: one for doing numerical computing with NumPy and SciPy and another for doing symbolic computing with SymPy. Profiles make it easy to keep a separate configuration files, logs, and histories for each of these purposes.
Let’s start by showing how a profile is used:
$ ipython --profile=sympy
This tells the ipython command line program to get its configuration
from the “sympy” profile. The file names for various profiles do not change. The
only difference is that profiles are named in a special way. In the case above,
the “sympy” profile means looking for ipython_config.py
in <IPYTHONDIR>/profile_sympy
.
The general pattern is this: simply create a new profile with:
$ ipython profile create <name>
which adds a directory called profile_<name>
to your IPython directory. Then
you can load this profile by adding --profile=<name>
to your command line
options. Profiles are supported by all IPython applications.
IPython extends the config loader for Python files so that you can inherit config from another profile. To do this, use a line like this in your Python config file:
load_subconfig('ipython_config.py', profile='default')