Use nbclient for execution (when out of alpha)

[choldgraf]

Hey all - a quick note that the nbconvert project recently decided to factor out the notebook execution functionality into a separate repository:

https://github.com/jupyter/nbclient

I'm not sure whether this is going to be relevant for this project, given the discussion around not using Jupyter Notebooks as the execution layer for code. However, it might be worth watching and potentially contributing upstream to that project, if there are in-scope things that would be beneficial for a repository that is focused on execution etc

[chrisjsewell]

Yeh cool ta, I was aware that this was on the cards (the repo is looking a bit empty so far though lol).
I've actually already written a basic implementation of this, it means that you can execute code outside/independent of a Jupyter Notebook, so it might be useful if e.g. we wanted to execute code in plain text files (RST directives, etc), without having to first convert it to a notebook.

[akhmerov]

Well, "conversion to notebook" means merely populating an nbformat.NotebookNode object. That's what I ended up doing in https://jupyter-sphinx.readthedocs.io/ . While decoupling execution from the notebook format seems a good idea, nbformat/nbconvert also provide a familiar heuristic in treatment of outputs/execute results.

[chrisjsewell]

nbformat/nbconvert also provide a familiar heuristic in treatment of outputs/execute results.

and that will still be there in nbclient, it just removes the dependencies and extra steps of processing required by nbconvert (which you don't necessarily need for pure execution).

[choldgraf]

First steps towards building out the repository! jupyter/nbclient#1

[mmcky]

thanks @choldgraf this is cool - and will be useful for other projects.
Are there plans to incorporate error reports and testing capabilities for notebooks?

[choldgraf]

who knows :-) I think that one of the goals of factoring out the "execution engine" part of notebooks is to more easily explore new spaces that are worth pursuing, but that would be harder to pursue when it is also part of a document conversion engine

[chrisjsewell]

thanks @choldgraf this is cool - and will be useful for other projects.
Are there plans to incorporate error reports and testing capabilities for notebooks?

For this I would note my pytest-notebook package, which will be able to use nbclient when it is ready.

[chrisjsewell]

closed in d618168