Trash: Cookbook Moving config to IPython 0.11

The configuration system has been rewritten for IPython 0.11, and the config files for previous versions will no longer work. To start configuring, you will need to use the command ipython profile create. This will create default config files, and tell you where they have been placed. The location depends on the system, but is typically ~/.ipython/profile_default/ipython_config.py.

These files are loaded as Python code, so they can contain arbitrary expressions.

A key variable is c.InteractiveShellApp.exec_lines. This is a list of strings of IPython code which will be executed in your shell before the first prompt.

To create other profiles, type ipython profile create <name>. The bundled profiles (cluster, math, pylab, pysh and sympy) will automatically be created the first time you start IPython using them.

Note: This page is a work in progress. If you've already upgraded your configuration to the 0.11 system, please add any useful information.

One User's Experience

Here is how I upgraded my config on Linux. I was unable to determine any automated process and since the system was new with 0.11, I just started from scratch.

I used the profile create command within ipython, which created ~/.ipython/profile_default and created some history files and other files I know nothing about in that directory. Then I created a new file, ipython_config.py in the same directory. This is where the configuration commands go.

Now, the documentation on configuration in IPython Documentation (singular PDF file) could use some revision. I grabbed some things and started creating a self-documenting ipython_config.py. One item of confusion in that documentation is that it suggests that your configuration file must not have spaces around the equals sign in the attribute=value statements. This doesn't seem to be the case, and would seem to be irregular with python syntax.

My main concern was to get emacs going as my editor (for %edit) using the emacs server mechanism. The code to set this up on emacs end is documented but the statement to invoke it from ipython was not covered. Here is a minimal config file to set that up:

c=get_config()  # get the Config instance
c.InteractiveShell.editor='emacsclient -c -a=emacs'

Then it works for terminal ipython. If you use the qtconsole, then this should be added:

c.IPythonWidget.editor = 'emacsclient -c -a=emacs'

These also might be useful:

c.InteractiveShell.autoindent=True
c.InteractiveShell.colors='LightBG'

Note: if you copy code out of the documentation, you should be aware that someone used the funky non-ASCII quotes and other characters. If you copy/paste into an editor and save those characters, ipython will die bitterly and complain about the syntax error and no coding chosen.