How can I share Jupyter notebooks with non-programmers?

The "best" way to share a Jupyter notebook is to simply to place it on GitHub (and view it directly) or some other public link and use the Jupyter Notebook Viewer. When privacy is more of an issue then there are alternatives but it's certainly more complex; there's no built-in way to do this in Jupyter alone, but a couple of options are:

Host your own nbviewer

GitHub and the Jupyter Notebook Veiwer both use the same tool to render .ipynb files into static HTML, this tool is nbviewer.

The installation instructions are more complex than I'm willing to go into here but if your company/team has a shared server that doesn't require password access then you could host the nbviewer on that server and direct it to load from your credentialed server. This will probably require some more advanced configuration than you're going to find in the docs.

Set up a deployment script

If you don't necessarily need live updating HTML then you could set up a script on your credentialed server that will simply use Jupyter's built-in export options to create the static HTML files and then send those to a more publicly accessible server.


Google has recently made public its internal Collaboratory project (link here). You can start a notebook in the same way as starting a Google Sheet or Google Doc, and then simply share the notebook or add collaborators..

For now, this is the easiest way for me.


Michael's suggestion of running your own nbviewer instance is a good one I used in the past with an Enterprise Github server.

Another lightweight alternative is to have a cell at the end of your notebook that does a shell call to nbconvert so that it's automatically refreshed after running the whole thing:

!ipython nbconvert <notebook name>.ipynb --to html

EDIT: With Jupyter/IPython's Big Split, you'll probably want to change this to !jupyter nbconvert <notebook name>.ipynb --to html now.