Loading Modules to IPython on Startup

Whenever I start IPython in a terminal, I always need to import my favorite modules before I can begin working. This is always a hassle these days due to the redundancy of the task, so let’s automate that as well!

IPython Profile

The key idea here is to go to your IPython profile and set up the actions you wish to run at startup. Your profile can be located at ~/.ipython/profile_default on Linux (you may have to do some google searching for your OS). This is the default IPython profile. There you should find a directory startup which has a README file in it.

Startup Script

You can read the README in the startup directory if you want, but all it says is that any .py and .ipy files in this directory will be executed by the Python interpreter before the prompt shows us. Kinda what we want, right?

Simply put a python file in this directory with the needed code. I put a file called pre.py (you can name the file whatever you want) with the following contents:

import numpy as np
import scipy as scp
import torch
import torchvision

And voila! You should be able to now open an IPython prompt and directly work with your modules.

Doing the above for your default profile is sufficient, though you can create a custom profile if you wish, depending on the project and other things.