How can the terminal in Jupyter automatically run bash instead of sh

Question

I love the terminal feature and works very well for our use case where I would like students to do some work directly from a terminal so they experience that environment. The shell that launches automatically is sh and does not pick up all of my bash defaults. I can type "bash" and everything works perfectly. How can I make "bash" the default?

I guess it should pick up your default shell. What shell do you get if you open a normal terminal? — cel, Nov 01 '15 at 21:22

score 24 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 30 '17 at 09:22

24

Jupyter uses the environment variable $SHELL to decide which shell to launch. If you are running jupyter using init then this will be set to dash on Ubuntu systems. My solution is to export SHELL=/bin/bash in the script that launches jupyter.

answered Jun 30 '17 at 09:22

Peter Ogden

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I have set this in /etc/profile and /etc/environment and yet I still have the same problem, any ideas why? – OneTwo Feb 04 '20 at 16:21
One can also launch jupyter with `SHELL=/bin/bash jupyter-lab ...` – Vladimir Vargas Jul 24 '23 at 16:03

score 7 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 13 '19 at 07:35

7

You can add this to your jupyter_notebook_config.py

c.NotebookApp.terminado_settings = {'shell_command': ['/bin/bash']}

answered Sep 13 '19 at 07:35

El Belga

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This didn't work for me for some reason, do you know of any ideas why? – OneTwo Feb 04 '20 at 16:19
You may need to use `c.ServerApp.terminado_settings` instead of `NotebookApp` in newer versions. – krassowski Aug 18 '22 at 18:29
With either `c.NotebookApp.terminado_settings` or `c.ServerApp.terminado_settings`, I'm getting the following error with Posit Workbench: `rstudio-server.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'` – sharchaea Jan 03 '23 at 17:55

Ken Pega · Answer 3 · 2017-11-01T05:44:06.527

I have tried the ultimate way of switching system-wide SHELL environment variable by adding the following line to the file /etc/environment:

    SHELL=/bin/bash

This works on Ubuntu environment. Every now and then, the SHELL variable always points to /bin/bash instead of /bin/sh in Terminal after a reboot.

Also, setting up CRON job to launch jupyter notebook at system startup triggered the same issue on jupyter notebook's Terminal.

It turns out that I need to include variable setting and sourcing statements for Bash init file like ~/.bashrc in CRON job statement as follows via the command $ crontab -e :

    @reboot source /home/USERNAME/.bashrc && \
            export SHELL=/bin/bash && \
            /SOMEWHERE/jupyter notebook --port=8888

In this way, I can log in the Ubuntu server via a remote web browser (http://server-ip-address:8888/) with opening jupyter notebook's Terminal default to Bash as same as local environment.

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 05 '23 at 12:41

Since Jupyter server 2.0.0, --ServerApp.terminado_settings="shell_command=['/bin/bash']" should work.

For jupyterlab==3.6, I can confirm myself it works:

jupyter lab --ServerApp.terminado_settings="shell_command=['/bin/bash']"

How can the terminal in Jupyter automatically run bash instead of sh

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