Getting Started

🛑Jan 2026 Major Version Update – Breaking Change🛑

nbdev3 is here! As many of you have been requesting, configuration has moved from settings.ini to pyproject.toml, following modern Python packaging standards (PEP 621). Your project metadata now lives in the standard [project] section, while nbdev-specific settings go in [tool.nbdev].

Migrating from nbdev2: Run nbdev-migrate-config in your project root to automatically convert your settings.ini to pyproject.toml and update your GitHub Actions workflows to use nbdev3-compatible versions. Your existing notebooks and code don’t need any changes.

nbdev is a notebook-driven development platform. Simply write notebooks with lightweight markup and get high-quality documentation, tests, continuous integration, and packaging for free!

nbdev makes debugging and refactoring your code much easier than in traditional programming environments since you always have live objects at your fingertips. nbdev also promotes software engineering best practices because tests and documentation are first class.

• Documentation is automatically generated using Quarto and hosted on GitHub Pages. Docs support LaTeX, are searchable, and are automatically hyperlinked (including out-of-the-box support for many packages via nbdev-index)
• Publish packages to PyPI and conda as well as tools to simplify package releases. Python best practices are automatically followed, for example, only exported objects are included in __all__
• Two-way sync between notebooks and plaintext source code allowing you to use your IDE for code navigation or quick edits. Sync is robust: each exported cell is tagged with its unique notebook cell ID, so nbdev-update always updates the correct cell
• Tests written as ordinary notebook cells are run in parallel with a single command
• Continuous integration out-of-the-box with GitHub Actions that run your tests and rebuild your docs
• Git-friendly notebooks with Jupyter/Git hooks that clean unwanted metadata and render merge conflicts in a human-readable format
• … and much more!

Install

nbdev works on macOS, Linux, and most Unix-style operating systems. It works on Windows under WSL, but not under cmd or Powershell.

You can install nbdev with pip:

pip install nbdev

Note that nbdev must be installed into the same Python environment that you use for both Jupyter and your project.

How to use nbdev

The best way to learn how to use nbdev is to complete either the written walkthrough or video walkthrough:

Alternatively, there’s a shortened version of the video walkthrough with coding sections sped up using the unsilence Python library – it’s 27 minutes faster, but a bit harder to follow.

You can also run nbdev-help from the terminal to see the full list of available commands:

!nbdev-help

nb-export                 Export a single nbdev notebook to a python script.
nbdev-bump-version        Increment version in __init__.py by one
nbdev-changelog           Create a CHANGELOG.md file from closed and labeled GitHub issues
nbdev-clean               Clean all notebooks in `fname` to avoid merge conflicts
nbdev-conda               Create a `meta.yaml` file ready to be built into a package, and optionally build and upload it
nbdev-contributing        Create CONTRIBUTING.md from contributing_nb (defaults to 'contributing.ipynb' if present). Skips if the file doesn't exist.
nbdev-create-config       Create a pyproject.toml config file.
nbdev-docs                Create Quarto docs and README.md
nbdev-export              Export notebooks in `path` to Python modules
nbdev-filter              A notebook filter for Quarto
nbdev-fix                 Create working notebook from conflicted notebook `nbname`
nbdev-help                Show help for all console scripts
nbdev-install             Install Quarto and the current library
nbdev-install-hooks       Install Jupyter and git hooks to automatically clean, trust, and fix merge conflicts in notebooks
nbdev-install-quarto      Install latest Quarto on macOS or Linux, prints instructions for Windows
nbdev-merge               Git merge driver for notebooks
nbdev-migrate             Convert all markdown and notebook files in `path` from v1 to v2
nbdev-migrate-config      Migrate settings.ini to pyproject.toml
nbdev-new                 Create an nbdev project.
nbdev-prepare             Export, test, and clean notebooks, and render README if needed
nbdev-preview             Preview docs locally
nbdev-proc-nbs            Process notebooks in `path` for docs rendering
nbdev-pypi                Create and upload Python package to PyPI
nbdev-readme              Create README.md from readme_nb (index.ipynb by default)
nbdev-release-both        Release both conda and PyPI packages
nbdev-release-gh          Calls `nbdev-changelog`, lets you edit the result, then pushes to git and calls `nbdev-release-git`
nbdev-release-git         Tag and create a release in GitHub for the current version
nbdev-requirements        Writes a `requirements.txt` file to `directory` based on pyproject.toml.
nbdev-sidebar             Create sidebar.yml
nbdev-test                Test in parallel notebooks matching `path`, passing along `flags`
nbdev-trust               Trust notebooks matching `fname`.
nbdev-update              Propagate change in modules matching `fname` to notebooks that created them
nbdev-update-license      Allows you to update the license of your project.
watch-export              Use `nb_export` on ipynb files in `nbs` directory on changes using nbdev config if available

FAQ

Q: What is the warning “Found a cell containing mix of imports and computations. Please use separate cells”?

A: You should not have cells that are not exported, and contain a mix of import statements along with other code. For instance, don’t do this in a single cell:

import some_module
some_module.something()

Instead, split this into two cells, one which does import some_module, and the other which does some_module.something().

Only top-level statements count: try: import blocks and imports inside function definitions are fine.

The reason for this is that when we create your documentation website, we ensure that all of the signatures for functions you document are up to date, by running the imports, exported cells, and show_doc functions in your notebooks. When you mix imports with other code, that other code will be run too, which can cause errors (or at least slowdowns) when creating your website.

Q: Why is nbdev asking for root access? How do I install Quarto without root access?

A: When you setup your first project, nbdev will attempt to automatically download and install Quarto for you. This is the program that we use to create your documentation website.

Quarto’s standard installation process requires root access, and nbdev will therefore ask for your root password during installation. For most people, this will work fine and everything will be handled automatically – if so, you can skip over the rest of this section, which talks about installing without root access.

If you need to install Quarto without root access on Linux, first cd to wherever you want to store it, then download Quarto, and type:

dpkg -x quarto*.deb .
mv opt/quarto ./
rmdir opt
mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
ln -s "$(pwd)"/quarto/bin/quarto ~/.local/bin

To use this non-root version of Quarto, you’ll need ~/.local/bin in your PATH environment variable. (Alternatively, change the ln -s step to place the symlink somewhere else in your path.)

Q: Someone told me not to use notebooks for “serious” software development!

A: Watch this video. Don’t worry, we still get this too, despite having used nbdev for a wide range of “very serious” software projects over the last three years, including deep learning libraries, API clients, Python language extensions, terminal user interfaces, and more!

Contributing

If you want to contribute to nbdev, be sure to review the contributions guidelines. This project adheres to fastai’s code of conduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code. In general, we strive to abide by generally accepted best practices in open-source software development.

Make sure you have nbdev’s git hooks installed by running nbdev-install-hooks in the cloned repository.

Copyright

Copyright © 2019 onward fast.ai, Inc. Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the “License”); you may not use this project’s files except in compliance with the License. A copy of the License is provided in the LICENSE file in this repository.