---
title: Jupyter with Ruby and Rails (plus OpenAI function calling)
slug: jupyter-with-ruby-and-rails-plus-openai-function-calling
published_at: 2023-11-10 13:00:34 +0000
updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:12:55 +0000
summary: 
description: In this episode you&#39;ll learn how to set up Jupyter notebooks with a Ruby kernel. We&#39;ll load our rails application into a Jupyter notebook and play around with function calling to create an Active Record model!  #rubyonrails #ruby #rails
tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, javascript, ruby on rails, active record, ruby on rails tutorial, openai, open ai, function calling, jupyter, sciruby, daru, daru data frames]
views: 1093
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/jupyter-with-ruby-and-rails-plus-openai-function-calling
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTmcdixuqcY
youtube_id: WTmcdixuqcY
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/WTmcdixuqcY
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WTmcdixuqcY/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Jupyter with Ruby and Rails (plus OpenAI function calling)

*Published: November 10, 2023*
*Views: 1093*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTmcdixuqcY)

[![Jupyter with Ruby and Rails (plus OpenAI function calling)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WTmcdixuqcY/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTmcdixuqcY)

## Description

In this episode you&#39;ll learn how to set up Jupyter notebooks with a Ruby kernel. We&#39;ll load our rails application into a Jupyter notebook and play around with function calling to create an Active Record model!

#rubyonrails #ruby #rails

## Transcript

what&#39;s up welcome back in this episode we&#39;re going to talk about Jupiter if you&#39;ve looked around at some open AI or just general AI tutorials a ton of them are in Python understandably python is a great data science language we&#39;re going to use Ruby though and we want to use Ruby but one of the amazing tools in the python ecosystem and a tool that you see a lot in a lot of these tutorials is called Jupiter so Jupiter is a way of collecting up different Snippets of code and running them in cells and so we&#39;ll look at jupyter notebooks real quick we&#39;re going to show how to install them and then how to work with them with Ruby and we&#39;re going to just build on top of that I think this will be a foundational episode because in future episodes we&#39;ll use Jupiter as the base to go through and explore some data science stuff with Ruby so the first step is to install Jupiter so we&#39;re going to head over here I like using Homebrew even though it&#39;s the bottom of the list here so I&#39;m going to say Brew install Jupiter lab and this is going to go out and install this with home brew so Jupiter itself is a like a handful of different tools it gives you a web browser that allows you to interact with a kernel a kernel is a uh little piece of software that run that knows how to run a specific programming language a lot of times when people use jupyter notebooks they use them with python and and so python is the default kernel that comes with Jupiter it turns out this is already built into vs code but it only has a couple of kernels in there so it looks like maybe this worked so let&#39;s see if we run Jupiter great all right so now we have Jupiter installed and we can say Jupiter notebook and this will fire up a little web server and the web server will automatically open at Local Host 88 and here you can see I&#39;m browsing around so some local directories if I wanted to I could say give me a new notebook this is going to create a new file with the IP y andb the I python notebook extension and by default when I fire this up I only have one kernel that&#39;s the Python 3 kernel so if I select this and I say okay yes now I can do like some python stuff Hello World and what&#39;s cool is you&#39;ve got these cells and so we can click to add a cell and we might say I don&#39;t know for X in range one to 20 print X okay so then it just prints those out python has a bunch of awesome tools and there&#39;s a lot of things in this ecosystem for displaying and doing all these visualizations and stuff very cool but we don&#39;t want to write python we want to write Ruby right how do we install a ruby kernel so that we can use Jupiter with Ruby the folks over here at sauby have created an iuby kernel that we can use while we&#39;re inside of Jupiter the way that I like to install this is also with gem install and then we&#39;re going to register iuby so we&#39;re going to come back over to our terminal I&#39;m going to stop the Jupiter notebook server we&#39;re going to say gem install iuby and we&#39;re going to register it with Das force that does something with Homebrew so we&#39;ll restart our Jupiter notebook here and fire it up very cool and now we can say let&#39;s create another new notebook on titled one now we have another kernel here start the other kernel Ruby 3.2.2 awesome very cool so now we can do puts hello world and we see Hello World come out that is so awesome right now we can do things like I don&#39;t know let&#39;s create uh an array and the array is going to be 1 two three four whatever U bad style now when I create a variable in this cell I can use it down below so I can say a. each do X I don&#39;t know puts X and and then I can run this I&#39;m running it with command enter there&#39;s different settings here so you can set it up so that um when you hit enter it will automatically go but because I&#39;m adding new lines I want it to automatically run for me one thing that I is super annoying is that when you go to indentation here and you say I want to use two spaces it doesn&#39;t listen to you so let&#39;s say I really want to use two spaces now let&#39;s like try to rerun this so do X and when I hit enter it still adds four spaces at the beginning I want two spaces people two spaces it&#39;s all right okay so now I can run that and I still get this is my output this is my put s or my print output and then at the bottom I have the return value from this function call which is a so I see that there right very cool you can do all kinds of stuff require I don&#39;t know different you can require your gems in here here as you would expect and you can use those which is pretty handy but at this point you might say okay that&#39;s cool and that&#39;s like a great way to explore and play around with Ruby but you just have vanilla Ruby at this point other than maybe some gems that you install let&#39;s try require Faker and then we can do puts Faker No how about internet. email cool so that&#39;s pulling in the faker Gem and then printing out email addresses that&#39;s pretty neat there is this awesome gem called Jupiter on Rails Go star and heart this gem this thing is awesome so it requires just installing a couple of different things Jupiter on Rails and FM ffi RZ mq or Z CZ top these two libraries help us interact with zeromq which is a way that the Jupiter notebook is communicating with the colonel over websockets with Json and so these are just like a couple other dependencies so this is a gem that we&#39;re going to install but first let&#39;s make a new rails app so we&#39;ll say rails New Jupiter fun- T database is post gql okay pleas CD into Jupiter fun and Ben Dev this should fire up a server and we can go to Local Host 3000 and see failure DB create DB migrate that&#39;ll fire up some database stuff for us okay so now we&#39;ve got a rails application rails G scaffold article and we&#39;ll give it a title and a body and the body will have some text and yeah we&#39;ll just start with that and this is like the standard rails demo right rails DB migrate that will migrate our database go to our routes file we&#39;ve already got resources articles fantastic so now if we go to slash articles we should have a way to create a new article and we&#39;re going to say test and test body create article and now we&#39;re coming back to our list of Articles very cool now let&#39;s install this gem Jupiter on Rails and ffi R zmq now I only want these gems to be installed in development mode probably so I&#39;m going to just drop them in here I don&#39;t know if you want them to be in production you&#39;ll probably want to lock some stuff down I have no idea whether or not these things are production ready but they&#39;re fun to play with install so we&#39;ll fire these up I&#39;m going to kill the server while that is installing now it installed a couple things I&#39;m not sure what packable is but D Ru this is like data analytics for Ruby this it&#39;s the like Ruby&#39;s answer to pandas and it gives us things like data frames and some other stuff for doing data analytics very cool some very cool Integrations between Jupiter on Rails or Jupiter and daru or deru am I saying that right who knows okay so now what we can do is rails Jupiter colon notebook this is a command that we get from the Jupiter on Rails from the Jupiter on Rails gem that fires up a Jupiter notebook for us and you&#39;ll notice that we&#39;re inside of our rails app very cool all right so now if we say new notebook the kernel that we pick is we can pick a kernel based on our rails application I don&#39;t know the difference between one with sandbox and one without so we&#39;re just going to call create the one without sandbox there and say select and now we can do stuff like article. all and hit enter and now we see this article that was stored in the database very cool awesome awesome stuff so fun and now let&#39;s just see like pluck title or something right gives you back the title very cool way to play around with these things and the other thing or like one of the things again that Jupiter on Rails gives us and daru gives us is article. 2 DF and to D I thought it was DF yeah that should have I wonder why that didn&#39;t work maybe we need to all right so this is a daru data frame so I needed to install a couple things uh a couple extra things so it turns out that I needed to install the Matrix gem I think when I was experimenting I was using a different version of Ruby that had Matrix built in and now we have to install it so whatever by installing the Matrix Jam that fixed the daru data frame situation so now we have daru data frames so there&#39;s a bunch of cool stuff you can do with this so we can say DF is equal to this thing and then if we wanted to create a new cell here we can mess around with the DF do index I think indexes maybe or index tells you what the index is and then you can like key into that index and it&#39;ll tell you stuff about that so I think right now it&#39;s just like keying into the different columns but data frames there&#39;s lots of cool data sciency stuff you can do with those so that exists todf when you&#39;re inside of the Jupiter notebook so let&#39;s play around a little bit with open Ai and the open AI ruby gem here for a second so I&#39;m going to bundle add this bundle add Ruby open aai and then I&#39;m going to open up my an initializer here and we&#39;ll say open ai. RB and I am going to set my I&#39;m just going to set my access token in rails. application credentials open AI key and have that configured globally so I can say editor is rails credentials edit and I&#39;m not going to set an environment and here I&#39;m going to say open AI uh key and this is where I&#39;m going to set my key if you&#39;re trying to follow along at home go grab your open AI key and drop it here all right now that is set from inside of our Jupiter notebook we should be able to do something like say client I don&#39;t know if I need to restart this actually let&#39;s yeah let&#39;s restart this since we changed the initializer I don&#39;t know if how those were reloaded or if they&#39;re reloaded at all so I&#39;m going to restart the kernel here by saying rails jupyter notebook and then let&#39;s just grab a new one here and we&#39;ll say we want to use Jupiter fun okay client is equal to open AI client. new and then I am okay I guess I&#39;m going to roll that API key okay so if we go back over here to the docs let&#39;s look at a completion endpoint or a chat maybe a chat endpoint and just see if this is working as expected so we&#39;ll grab the chat example and we just run it boom so this is using 3.5 turbo and we got back a response so the user said hello and the response was hello how can I assist you today so this is like a standard open AI example demo going on here but one thing that I thought might be cool just to experiment with this and show like a more realistic example is let&#39;s have it write a bunch of like dummy articles using a function calling so function calling is a feature of open AI that lets you pass in some structured arguments and tell open AI how you want your data to come back so that it can call so that it can call functions so let&#39;s create a new function here called create article and maybe it&#39;s going to take in the title and the body okay and this is to say article is article. new title body and then we&#39;re going to say article. saave bang to see if we can actually save it and that should be fine so what we want to do is we want to tell open AI that we we have this new function called create article and that we want back data that can be passed as arguments into our create article function so in the example here so if we look for function calling we want to pass we&#39;re going to pass some M some messages to chat but we&#39;re also going to start passing some functions to chat so here what we want to do is we have our messages that we&#39;re passing to chat now we&#39;re also going to pass some functions now the function in our case is called create article and the description is like creates and blog post for developers who visit cjv dodev or something I don&#39;t know okay and then the properties here this is the properties of the object that we want returned and passed as arguments into create article so we&#39;ve got a couple properties we&#39;ve got a title and that is going to be like the short or like the concise title of the article and we&#39;ve also got a body this is going to be also type string and in this case the description will be something like the content of the article yeah in markdown format okay the required arguments are title and body and we&#39;ve got a temperature situation going on here and I think that should be okay our spacing and indentation is all so whack I don&#39;t like it but whatever all right so let&#39;s just fire that off and see what we get back okay so this is just the raw response from open aai and we get back an ID an object some other stuff and inside of here we should get I see okay hi there how can I assist you today so we actually want the content to be like write an article about how to use function calling with the open AI API using Ruby follow the docs here and let&#39;s just give it something I don&#39;t know I don&#39;t know if this is actually going to work yeah for Ruby web developers okay and here&#39;s our function create article okay let&#39;s just see is it actually going to to do the function calling thing maybe their example is like use the weather API or something like that but I don&#39;t know boom all right so now we got this response here and in the response one of the keys is function call and the name of the function is create article and the arguments is this Big Blob of arguments and the we&#39;ve got a Title Here using function calling with open AI in Ruby rails and it&#39;s in markdown format look look at that introduction as a Ruby on Rails developer working with rails you may find yourself wanting to interact with blah blah blah fantastic awesome awesome awesome okay in the docs here there is also an example for how to extract the different bits and pieces so we&#39;ll just copy that and add it below here so we&#39;re going to pull out from the response the actual message that came back and if the roll so here we see the the role is assistant if the role is assistant and it is and and there is a function call message then we want to grab the name of the function call that came out so create article and we want to parse the args as Json and then we&#39;re just doing like a quick switch statement on the function name and if that&#39;s the right name then we&#39;re going to call create article if you are like a longtime Ruby Dev you know that we could probably make some meta programming that actually just calls the stuff under the hood we don&#39;t want to get too crazy here but this should call create article with the arguments as expected should we run it again let&#39;s just fire away huh so let&#39;s run this again while it&#39;s working this will show a star while the cell is like executing and a lot of these open AI calls take a while there&#39;s also really interesting things where we can like reference back cells so here we see five and the output is true that true is actually because article. saave bang is executing and that is the return value of this whole evaluation so if we were to go back over to our articles here and refresh nope we don&#39;t have the server running Bev and refresh and go back to articles holy moly look at that title using function calling with open Ai and Ruby here&#39;s the body sick all right look at that that&#39;s even in markdown and everything that is awesome what&#39;s really cool is you could imagine having a bunch of these methods maybe you create an article create a category create whatever your heart desires as uh you know little tiny Json bits and pieces that you might want back from an a large language model an llm the other piece of the puzzle here is that I am starting to recognize a little bit of a pattern where I like to put my prompts like the content that goes here inside of view components and then use those view components to render out the cont content of the prompt and then using a job to actually execute these background these things in the background and then write them into Data that&#39;s in these models and then use the data that&#39;s in the models to inform future requests by just like looking up relevant models that are related to those future requests so we&#39;ll keep doing more and more with this open AI stuff but this is uh how you set up Jupiter how you can do some basic function calling hopefully that was useful and yeah we got some exciting stuff coming down the pipe I&#39;m really pumped to play with GPT 4 Turbo and yeah excited to see what we&#39;ll be able to build with that so thanks so much for watching and we&#39;ll see you in the next one [Music] cheers

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