Sharing Interactive IPython/Jupyter Notebooks for Non-Technical Users - jupyter-notebook

Is there an optimal way to share/serve a readonly-ish Jupyter notebooks with the input code cells hidden, but connected to a live kernel so users can interact with widgets?
I understand there are ways to embed data for widgets, but often the widgets require rerunning a query against a larger data sets.
I've recently started learning to use widgets and they'd be really useful to share interactive data with our non-technical staff, but I haven't figured out a good way to do so yet.
Having this capability would also reduce the desire for expensive tools like Tableau.

If you use kyso.io (disclaimer: I founded kyso) you can share notebooks online easily:
It will you can show/hide code so non-technical people can read it
Interactive visualisations work perfectly, like bokeh and plotly.
Heres some examples:
https://kyso.io/laura/bokeh-example
https://kyso.io/laura/gauss-fitting
you can share a notebook using these commands
kyso create "some study title"
kyso push "a version message"
Currently the notebooks are static renderings, but soon we are going to host
runnable Jupyter dashboards.

Take a look Apache Zeppelin https://zeppelin.apache.org. Which is closest opensource software that you can share a notebook with code hidden and let other users run it. Apache Zeppelin has Dynamic form, which is not exactly widgets but used for the same purpose. Zeppelin supports notebook level access control so you can achieve what you want.(disclaimer: I'm creator of Apache Zeppelin)
You can also take a look notebook sharing service https://www.zepl.com. Which enables
Access control on the notebook
Notebook updates auto synced from Github / S3
Report looknfeel (Hide code for non-technical people)
Comments on the cells
Team and Workspace to organize sharing
Both Jupyter notebook and Zeppelin notebook format support
This can be an possible alternative on sharing your notebook with non-technical users. (disclaimer: I'm co-founder of ZEPL)

Related

Creating a publicly distributed Jupyter Notebook from Github repo

I have an online course (Performance Ninja), which I would like to turn into a publicly distributed Jupyter Notebook. The course is hosted on Github. There I have the source code for the lab assignments that students need to work on. They need to fix the issue by changing the code and submit (git push) their work. It will be picked up by Github Actions and sent to my remote server, which is appropriately configured for performance benchmarking. Thus, I don't rely on virtualized CI machines offered by Github for example, they are not suitable for performance measurements.
I want to make a Jupyter Notebook, which will be a view into my Github repo. It will provide nice interface, ability to focus on the part of the code that matters (kernel of the benchmark), and have a simple way of submitting solutions for automated benchmarking (just hit Shift-Enter).
I was looking at JupyterHub. It should work nicely, but then the issue is that I have to have a public static IP for the JupyterHub server.
Ideally, I would like to be able to trigger Github Actions workflow from the Jupyter Notebook itself. A user (student) would authenticate themselves with Github, change the code and hit Shift-Enter, which will trigger Github Actions (maybe pushing the code to a private branch).
I assume I’m not the first person facing a similar problem. I would like to hear from people with experience, what would be my best option here?

Can people without R installed run an R Notebook file successfully?

I have an R Notebook that I am building to provide an analysis for somebody, and I am wondering if I should choose another option as I don't know if she will be able to run the Notebook without having R installed.
Is it possible to run an R Notebook as a single entity or must you have R installed in order to do it?
To rerun the notebook they require R. But the whole point of R Notebooks is that they produce a static document as output. That document (usually in HTML format) can be shared in isolation, and does not require any additional software besides a web browser to be viewerd.
Notebook will need R to run. To distribute a notebook without the R dependency will be a bit more elaborate, like installing rstudio server within a docker container. User will, in this particular case, need to have Docker installed and know how to start a container. From there on the user can interact with the code through a web browser.
Another option would be to use the cloud solution that some companies offer. It offers sharing functionality and you don't have to worry about the infrastructure or distribution of your work. There are some free plans that may work for you, but the real power is in premium features.

how can i share a Jupyter Notebook?

I am using Julia but didn't really like the IDE (more of a notebook guy). So I used for the first time Jupyter (lab and notebooks).
I started Jupyter from Anaconda and made my notebook. The thing is I want to share it. Like other people can access a link and get to run my code.
I don't really know how GitHub works, but I somehow managed to upload the notebook there. I saw this thing called "Binder" that could run my code on another computer. But I try to put my Github link there and just get an error.
Can someone that used Jupyter can explain it to me?
Ah, I almost forgot, when I google Jupyter Notebook and start one with Julia I can use this Binder Thing. But when I do it on my own I can't.
Here I put the screenshot I made on the Demo of Jupyter+binder so you can see it says to send a binder link
While there are many options, the best and the easiest way is through Jupyter's menu:
File -> Download as -> HTML
You end up with a HTML containing all code cells and all results (including pictures) which is perhaps the best for viewing by others.
Github can be used to natively publish a *.ipynb and show it to users as a static HTML, however I find it not very stables (rendering keeps failing from time to time) and hence I opt for generating the HTML file yourself and use eg. Github pages for hosting it.
Another interesting option is to share just the *.ipynb file and recommend people Open Source https://nteract.io/ as the viewer.
Yet another option that is sometimes use is to host a JupyterHub on an AWS EC2 instance (a single t2.micro is free for one year within the AWS free tier) and give my collaborators logins and passwords (this though requires quite a bit of configuration work).

What is the easiest way to create a webapp from an interactive Jupyter Notebook?

I have a Jupyter Notebook that plots some data and lets the user interact with it via a slider.
What would be the easiest way to make a web app with a similar functionality? (reusing as much of the code...)
I believe the easiest way is to use voilà.
After installing you just have to run:
voila <path-to-notebook> <options>
And you will have a server running your notebook as a web app, with all the input code omitted.
AppMode is "A Jupyter extension that turns notebooks into web applications".
From the README:
Appmode consist of a server-side and a notebook extension for Jupyter.
Together these two extensions provide the following features:
One can view any notebook in appmode by clicking on the Appmode button in the toolbar. Alternatively one can change the url from
baseurl/notebooks/foo.ipynb to baseurl/apps/foo.ipynb. This also
allows for direct links into appmode.
When a notebook is opened in appmode, all code cells are automatically executed. In order to present a clean UI, all code cells
are hidden and the markdown cells are read-only.
A notebook can be opened multiple times in appmode without interference. This is achieved by creating temporary copies of the
notebook for each active appmode view. Each appmode view has its
dedicated ipython kernel. When an appmode page is closed the kernel is
shutdown and the temporary copy gets removed.
To allow for passing information between notebooks via url parameters, the current url is injected into the variable
jupyter_notebook_url.
To be complete - there exists also https://www.streamlit.io/ .
I still dont understand the exact difference between voila and streamlit.
At the moment I just struggle with the possibility to re-run everything with new parameters... I have bad luck with voila still.
Edit: I see that streamlit requires a raw python, not .ipynb, this fact would mean that this answer is completely wrong, I will search a bit more on streamlit before further action/comment.
Edit2: Voila looks great. However, I found few things that uncover the underlying complexity and thus a troubles that may arise.
callbacks. Widgets work great in jupyter, but since it is not possible to re-run one cell, sometimes the logic must be modified to work in Voila.
interactive java objects need a special treatment, e.g. matplotlib has a cheap solution, but there was nothing for e.g. jsroot
links. It is easy to create (a file and) a download link in jupyter, Voila can also serve a file, but it needs another extra treatment.
After all, I pose myself a question - is it better to learn many tricks and modifications to jupyter or to use some other system? I am going to see if streamlit can give em some answer.
The Jupyter Dashboards Bundlers extension from the Jupyter Incubator is one way to do it while retaining interactivity.
EDIT: While pip installing this package will also install the cms package dependency, like dashboard_bundlers, cms needs to be explicitly enabled/quick-setup as a notebook extension for the dashboard tools to work.
#raphaelts has the right idea and should be the accepted answer. As of Dec 2019, Voila is the most appropriate method to deploy Jupyter notebooks to production as a stand alone webapp. Think internal datascience teams sharing their analytics workload with internal C-Suite teams using SPA stlye Notebooks with all the code hidden and custom GUI/interactions thrown in. Recently discussed on HN
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20160634 and the official announcement from the Jupyter maintainer https://blog.jupyter.org/and-voil%C3%A0-f6a2c08a4a93enter link description here
As mentioned above, voilà is a very powerful tool which hides the input cells from your notebooks and therefore provides a clean interface. In order to deploy your notebook with voilà you need to follow the specific steps of your organization. But if you want to quickly run it on your machine, simply install it with pip install voila. Then you can enter start from the command-line: voila my_notebook.ipynb or use the "Voila" button which should have appeared in your Jupyter notebook.
Note, however, that using voilà is only one part of the story. You also need to build the required interactivity, ie. to set up how to respond to input changes. There are quite a few frameworks for this.
The simplest one is to use the interact function or the observe method from the Ipywidgets library. This is very direct, but things can easily get out of control as you start having more and more widgets and complexity.
There are complete frameworks, some of them mentioned above. E.g. streamlit, dash and holoviz. These are very powerful and suited for larger projects.
But if you want to keep it simple, I also recommend to check out autocalc. It is a very easy-to-use library, which lets you define the dependencies between your widgets/variables and let all the recalculation be triggered automatically. A tutorial can be found here.
Disclaimer: I am the author of the autocalc package.
The easiest way is to use the Mercury framework. You can reuse all your code. To convert the notebook to web app you will need to add the YAML header in the first cell of the notebook (very similar to R Markdown). The widgets are generated based on YAML. The end-user can tweak widgets values and click the Run button to execute the notebook from the top to the bottom. You can easily hide the notebook's code (if you want) by setting the show-code: False in the YAML. The example notebook and corresponding web app are below.
Example of the notebook with YAML header
Example web app generated from notebook with Mercury

is it possible to embed an interactive IPython Notebook in my website/blog?

Suppose I've created my wonderful IPython notebook (that is, a .ipynb file).
Now, is it possible to make it available for users of my website/blog?
With "available" I mean the following: they arrive to my website, find the notebook and immediately start to play with it (run code, display plots, change parameters etc etc)... But, without need the need to install anything on their local machine.
I already know the existence of Jupyther, that make it possible to share notebooks. But, as in this example, what the user would find is a simple web page, and in order to run the code he would have to download the .ipynb --> save it in local machine ---> open it with a pre-installed IPython interpreter.
This is something I would like to avoid.
Hope I was clear.
Thanks in advance for your time.
Gabriele
You can use tmpnb, which provides temporary notebook servers that get discarded after a while. If you want to have a different UI that better fits into a blog post, have a look at thebe.

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