The Problem⌗

On Linux, you just pip install jupyter and you can run jupyter notebook or jupyter lab and it will listen on localhost by default and open the browser for you. This is relevant, because notebooks are useful for prototyping and quickly testing new ideas. On Windows, however, if you’re using WSL or WSL2 (who isn’t?), this won’t happen. You’ll have two main issues:

  1. localhost on WSL won’t be accessible via your Windows browser, because WSL is essentially running on a VM, and it has its own separate network.
  2. Your Windows browser won’t open and, instead, the default shell browser will open, which is something like links, a text-based browser.

The Solution⌗

  1. The VM has a Windows-accessible IP, so we can listen on that IP instead.
  2. It’s possible to open the default Windows browser from WSL, using wslu.

Setting up Jupyter to listen on the WSL IP⌗

Edit ~/.jupyter/jupyter_notebook_config.py to include the following lines:

import subprocess
...
c.NotebookApp.ip = subprocess.check_output(['hostname', '-I'], text=True).strip()
...

Changing the default browser to the Windows default⌗

First, install wslu, following the instructions here.

Then, set your BROWSER environment variable to wslview.

For bash:

echo 'export BROWSER=wslview' >> ~/.bashrc
exec bash

For fish:

echo 'set -x BROWSER wslview' >> ~/.config/fish/config.fish
exec fish

Launching Jupyter⌗

You can now run Jupyter Notebook:

jupyter notebook

Or Jupyter Lab:

jupyter lab

Your default Windows browser should open and display Jupyter as usual.