Feature Request: Support Jupyter Notebook (README.ipynb) as a repository README

[maximilianMairinger]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

Body

Description:
I would like to suggest adding native support for Jupyter Notebooks (.ipynb) to be used and rendered as the primary README file for a repository or folder (e.g., README.ipynb).

Current Behavior:
Currently, GitHub recognizes files like README.md and automatically renders them on the repository's main page. However, if a repository is heavily focused on data science, machine learning, or research, developers must either duplicate their efforts by exporting their introductory notebook to markdown or simply link to the notebook from a standard README.md. Currently, a README.ipynb just shows the plain text content of the notebook.

Proposed Solution:
If a README.ipynb file is present in the root directory (or a subfolder), GitHub should automatically render it on the repository/folder landing page using GitHub's existing Jupyter Notebook rendering engine.

A rendering engine for ipynb notebooks already exists, so the implementation effort should not be very high.

I dont think this will break anything.

Why this matters (Use Cases):

• Data Science & ML: Many AI and data science repositories use notebooks to explain how to use the project, complete with runnable code cells, equations, and inline data visualizations (graphs/plots).
• Reduced Friction: It eliminates the need for developers to maintain two separate files (the explanatory notebook and the markdown README) or build continuous integration (CI) workflows just to convert .ipynb to .md on every push.
• Rich Documentation: Notebooks naturally provide a richer onboarding experience by combining markdown explanations with actual, verifiable code outputs right on the repo's front page.

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