Jupyter Notebook Enhancements [Discussion]

Part 1 (2018)
18

I searched a bit about your question.

I found Jupytext a promising project that syncs Jupyter notebooks as plain text documents or as .py files. (It is made by Marc Wouts, the same author of the debug jupyter notebooks with pycharm method I mentioned in my previous post)

JupyterPyCharm_75pct
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Jupytext can save Jupyter notebooks as

  • Markdown and R Markdown documents,
  • Julia, Python, R, Bash, Scheme and C++ scripts.

Jupyter will save your notebook to your favorite format(s), from .ipynb to .py , .R , .jl , .md , .Rmd … The text representation can be edited outside of Jupyter. Simply refresh the notebook in Jupyter to get the latest input cells from the script or Markdown document. When refreshing, kernel variables are unaffected, and output cells are reloaded from the traditionnal .ipynb if present. You can also delete your .ipynb notebook entirely if you don’t need to save output cells.

Collaborating on Jupyter Notebooks

With Jupytext, collaborating on Jupyter notebooks with Git becomes as easy as collaborating on text files.

The setup is straightforward:

  • Open your favorite notebook in Jupyter notebook
  • Associate a .py representation (for instance) to that notebook
  • Save the notebook, and put the Python script under Git control. Sharing the .ipynb file is possible, but not required.

Collaborating then works as follows:

  • Your collaborator pulls your script. The script opens as a notebook in Jupyter, with no outputs.
  • They run the notebook and save it. Outputs are regenerated, and a local .ipynb file is created.
  • They change the notebook, and push their updated script. The diff is nothing else than a standard diff on a Python script.
  • You pull the changed script, and refresh your browser. Input cells are updated. The outputs from cells that were changed are removed. Your variables are untouched, so you have the option to run only the modified cells to get the new outputs.

@jeremy I remember you were working on a better version control of Jupyter notebooks, where we can exclude cell outputs. Maybe Jupytext is an ideal solution that can do that, and on top of that, it allows us to sync Jupter notebooks to our favourite IDE. Affectively we can use the good of both worlds. Nice debugging in IDE and nice inline outputs in Jupyter notebooks.

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