How to Store Variables in Jupyter Notebook

With the storemagic command %store we can store variables in IPython’s database. More particularly, the variables are stored under ~/.ipython/profile_default/db/autorestore/<variable_name>.

Let’s continue with some examples.

# create a dictionary of your credentials

my_creds = {'username':'George',
            'password': 'StrongPassword'}

my_creds

{'username': 'George', 'password': 'StrongPassword'}

# store the my_creds under IPython database

%store my_creds

Stored 'my_creds' (dict)

Now let’s open a new Jupyter notebook. If we try to run the my_creds variables, we get a NameError because we have not loaded it yet.

In order to load the variables, we need to run the following magic cell command.

%store -r

And as we can see, the file has been created under the expected path.

If we want to delete all the variables from storage, we type:

%store -z

If we want to delete specif variables from storage, we type:

# Remove the variable "my_creds" and its value from storage
%store -d my_creds

If we want to restore stored variables automatically whenever you launch a new Jupyter notebook, we will need to add the following line to the ipython_config.py file:

c.StoreMagics.autorestore = True

Another usage of the store magic cell:

• %store – Show list of all variables and their current values
• %store spam bar – Store the current value of the variables spam and bar to disk
• %store -d spam – Remove the variable and its value from storage
• %store -z – Remove all variables from storage
• %store -r – Refresh all variables, aliases and directory history from store (overwrite current values)
• %store -r spam bar – Refresh specified variables and aliases from store (delete current variables)
• %store foo >a.txt – Store value of foo to new file a.txt
• %store foo >>a.txt – Append value of foo to file a.txt

References

[1] IPython Documentation