nbsafety 0.0.31

Fearless interactivity for Jupyter notebooks.

nbsafety

About

nbsafety adds a layer of protection to computational notebooks by solving the stale dependency problem, a problem which exists due to the fact that notebooks segment execution into "cells" with implicit dependencies amongst themselves. Here's an example in action:

nbsafety accomplishes its magic using a combination of a runtime tracer (to build the implicit dependency graph) and a static checker (to provide warnings before running a cell), both of which are deeply aware of Python's data model. In particular, nbsafety requires minimal to no changes in user behavior, opting to get out of the way unless absolutely necessary and letting you use notebooks the way you prefer.

Install

To install, grab the package and install the Jupyter kernel spec. We also have an optional JupyterLab extension available with an improved interface:

pip install nbsafety
python -m nbsafety.install
jupyter labextension install jupyterlab-nbsafety  # optional but highly recommended if using JupyterLab

The optional JupyterLab extension shows cells with unsafe executions (due to uses of variables with stale dependencies) as having red collapsers, and recommends cells to run (in order to refresh variables with stale dependencies) by displaying them with green collapsers.

Running

Because nbsafety is implemented as a custom Jupyter kernel, it works for both Jupyter notebooks and JupyterLab (but JupyterLab with the additional labextension is recommended). To run an nbsafety kernel, select "Python 3 (nbsafety)" from the list of notebook types in Jupyter's "New" dropdown dialogue:

For JupyterLab, similarly select "Python 3 (nbsafety)" from the list of available kernels in the Launcher tab:

Uninstall

In addition to pip uninstall nbsafety, it is also necessary to deregister the kernel from Jupyter for a full uninstall (as well as the extension from JupyterLab, if using JupyterLab):

jupyter kernelspec uninstall nbsafety
jupyter labextension uninstall jupyterlab-nbsafety

License

Code in this project licensed under the BSD-3-Clause License.