nbmake 0.4

Pytest plugin for testing notebooks

nbmake

What? Pytest plugin for testing and releasing notebook documentation

Why? To raise the quality of scientific material through better automation

Who is this for? Research/Machine Learning Software Engineers who maintain packages/teaching materials with documentation written in notebooks.

Functionality

1. Executes notebooks using pytest and nbclient, allowing parallel notebook testing
2. Optionally writes back to the repo, allowing faster building of nbsphinx or jupyter book docs

Quick Start

pip install pytest nbmake
pytest --nbmake **/*ipynb

Allow errors and Configure Cell Timeouts

nbmake is built on top of nbclient and designed to compatible with nbsphinx and jupyter-book.

The jupyter book docs have a good description of how to ignore errors -- note that nbmake does not work with the external _config.yml configuration file. You must use the notebook JSON metadata field.

Parallelisation

Parallelisation with xdist is experimental upon initial release, but you can try it out:

pip install pytest-xdist

pytest --nbmake -n=auto

It is also possible to parallelise at a CI-level using strategies, see example

Build Jupyter Books Faster

Using xdist and the --overwrite flag let you build a large jupyter book repo faster:

pytest --nbmake --overwrite -n=auto examples
jb build examples

Advice on Usage

nbmake is best used in a scenario where you use the ipynb files only for development. Consumption of notebooks is primarily done via a docs site, built through jupyter book, nbsphinx, or some other means. If using one of these tools, you are able to write assertion code in cells which will be hidden from readers.

Pre-commit

Treating notebooks like source files lets you keep your repo minimal. Some tools, such as plotly may drop several megabytes of javascript in your output cells, as a result, stripping out notebooks on pre-commit is advisable:

# .pre-commit-config.yaml
repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/kynan/nbstripout
    rev: master
    hooks:
      - id: nbstripout

See https://pre-commit.com/ for more...

Disable Nbmake

Implicitly:

pytest

Explicitly:

pytest -p no:nbmake

See Also:

• nbmake action
• pytest
• jupyter book
• jupyter cache
• MyST-NB