Installing Beaker

Installing Beaker is easy! All you need to do is run:

pip install beaker-notebook

This installs a CLI tool named beaker which allows you to work with and administer your local Beaker environment.

Now that you’ve got things installed and set up, to start a new Beaker notebook, just simply run:

beaker notebook

Your notebook server will start up and Beaker will be ready to use at localhost:8888.

Configuration

When running as a local notebook, Beaker uses a configuration file to store your local settings, such as your preferred LLM provider.

You can locate, view, and update your Beaker configuration either via the Beaker UI or via the beaker cli command.

Configuration file

The Beaker configuration can be stored either as user-wide configuration file, or as a per-directory configuration. The user-wide configuration is usually located at /home/{user}/.config/beaker.conf, but you can confirm by running beaker config find. Alternatively, a file named .beaker.conf can be placed in any directory. Running beaker commands (including starting a notebook) in that directory (or any subdirectories in the tree), will use the local configuration file.

Note: .beaker.conf files may store your LLM provider API tokens. Take care to not accidentally expose this file, and exclude it from git, etc.

Viewing/Updating

In the UI, the configuration is accessible via the Config side-panel. When you make changes and save the config, the Beaker will update the active configuration file, or create a new user configuration file.

Next, you’ll run beaker config update to set up your configuration. This will create a beaker.conf file in your home directory’s .config folder. You can leave everything as the default except for the LLM_SERVICE_TOKEN which you’ll need to set to your OpenAI API (or other LLM provider) key.

Next steps

  • To install a prebuilt context (for example, a domain-specific context published by your team), see Adding Contexts.
  • To install a prebuilt subkernel that adds language support beyond Python, R, and Julia, see Adding Subkernels.
  • To take a first tour of the notebook interface, see Your First Notebook.
  • If you want to build your own context or subkernel, see Development.

Developer setup

For developers interested in modifying Beaker itself or contributing to it, clone the repository and run:

make dev

This will start Beaker in development mode, which automatically reloads when you make changes to the code so you can quickly iterate on changes to the core codebase.

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