This Django app adds one shell command, shell_ipynb, which starts up the IPython Notebook as your Django shell instead of the default. The IPython Notebook has several advantages, including that you can save a whole experimentation session as a reusable notebook, and HTML-based completion and code documentation.

The easiest way to install django-shell-ipynb is to use pip. Either do this from pypi:

pip install django-shell-ipynb

Or directly from github:

pip install git+git://github.com/cpbotha/django-shell-ipynb.git 

After successful installation, add django_shell_ipynb to your Django project's INSTALLED_APPS.

After having done this, you can start up the IPython Notebook Django shell with:

python manage.py shell_ipynb

At which point your browser should start up with the IPython Dashboard, from which you can create new or edit existing notebooks.

You can get the same behaviour with the shell_plus management command added by django-extensions app, which comes with a whole bunch of other management commands you might want or not want.

After releasing 0.2.0, I also discovered django_ipython_notebook. However, that one internally uses the deprecated django.core.management.setup_environ() function hardcoded for settings, and executes ipython using os.system(), both of which are not ideal.