Show HN: A tool to convert Jupyter notebooks to beautiful blogs | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A tool to convert Jupyter notebooks to beautiful blogs

github.com

150 pointshemanta21237 comments

Neat! Anyone working on projects to improve the share-ability, code review, version control, or web rendering of Jupyter notebooks, feel free to reach out to me when looking for an enthusiastic early user. Jupyter has been a game changer for my productivity as a data scientist, but I still struggle with something that seems as simple as "what's the best way to expose this to other people easily without having to set up a self-hosted nbviewer".

Is it tough to manually convert the md and use a CMS like Ghost or Hugo for website?

Alternatively, exporting HTML and publishing can also help right?

I'm curious why did you say so. Moreover did you check the recently released `voila` package that lets you publish Jupyter notebooks?

There are a bunch of ways that make it _possible_ to do all of this. What's really missing is a way to make it as easy as committing code to Github repo without having to do anything more than install a Github extension.

Right now, I do my work in a notebook, it's automatically converted to a Markdown file (for code review), and I use nbconvert to generate static html, which gets deployed to an internal docs site. I've also been tinkering with ReviewNB, which is trying to make notebook review look like code review, but it's separate from Github and is still fairly unpolished (but very promising!).

Ideally, the experience could be something like: * Install Github extension that offers a notebook review tab and automatically converts notebooks to a static HTML file that can be served from a url directly accessible from Github

I can think of a bunch of challenges involved in doing something like the above, but my experience working somewhere that offered a tool that allowed me to literally click one button within my notebook and have a shareable url that contained my notebook and the ability to comment line-by-line taught me that this massively unblocks data scientists, who will otherwise end up copy/pasting stuff into documents just to deliver things to partners faster.

> and is still fairly unpolished (but very promising!).

I'm all ears. Please write to me at amit@reviewnb.com

I built ReviewNB and push improvements almost every single day :)

By the way, voila looks very promising as well, thanks for the pointer.

Two projects I've been watching with interest are https://kyso.io/for-teams and http://reviewnb.com.

ReviewNB is very promising! I just wish it could live within Github (my idea is something like how Zenhub reorganizes issues into a Kanban board - add a tab that only allows viewing of ipynb files), since right now I have to kind of cajole people to review notebooks on their site.

I am the developer behind ReviewNB.

> I just wish it could live within Github

Whenever I thought of integrating the review experience in the GitHub UI (via browser extension), I always thought of overwriting the GitHub diff UI. That approach is very hacky and would result in the extension stability issues (any DOM change in GitHub diff could break the extension).

But I just looked at Zenhub and having a separate tab for notebook review could actually work! Since it relies only on the tab related HTML, the extension would be relatively stable. There's still a question of how to post comments etc. But it might be a good start to just offer notebook diff in a separate GitHub tab for pull requests.

Thanks @the_watcher.

Glad you saw this!

https://github.com/mwouts/jupytext looks like something you might enjoy. I'm not affiliated with the project in any way.

If you send me an email (dan@kaggle.com) I'd love to set up a time to show you some mockups that may be the solution you are looking for.

We are developing a Notebook like interface for SQL https://uktechdata.count.co/ https://stackoverflow.count.co/

Welcome to get your thoughts on this.

I have never understood why the "In[5]" and "Out[5]" in jupyter have to be so prominent, even in a output like this.

It seems useful to denote REPL input vs output, and to be able to identify output relating to input.

Sure, but the [5] feels unnecessary in a finished document like this. I mean, the output should be right after the input anyway, right?

It's so it's easy to refer to things, like equation numbers in a maths book, or line numbers in code. E.g. people talking about someone's notebook here on HN can be specific and clear.

The numbers track the order that the cells were executed in. So, strictly speaking, you need the numbers to be able to reproduce the output of the notebook's author. However, I think it's bad practice and pretty uncommon to publish a notebook where you need to execute the cells out of order. So most of the time the numbers aren't useful.

Indeed, and the line numbers are a warning that you might have an order-of-execution bug lurking somewhere.

Agreed. They should be (5) Input: / Output:. Where input and output are on the same level of indentation under (5).

_5 is a magic variable with the value of the output from cell 5. _ refers to the last output. Super handy when working interactively.

Oh my god. I have used Jupyter notebooks for 7 years and never knew this. I just had to fire one up to verify -- and yep; exactly as described. How amazing! Thank you!

I believe the _5 syntax is specific to Jupyter, but in Python, the output of the last statement you execute is bound to _

For example, if you simply enter 4 into a Python REPL, printing _ will also print 4

It's really handy if you call a long statement in the REPL and forget to save the output to a variable

I wrote about it once if you'd like to see some better examples: https://utf9k.net/blog/lost-python-results/

You just blew my mind.

I knew this, which may be handy when developing (assigning variables is superior IMO though)

But in final output like this? I don't like it.

No, you should not use output-references in code you share with people, but in my opinion it is one of the main reasons why jupyter notebooks in general put a large emphasis on displaying cell numbers

People working with notebooks find it useful. You can remove it with one line of javascript though.

Cool, but I would rather use a better supported static site generator with an ipynb plugin (ie, https://github.com/danielfrg/pelican-ipynb) than a tool just for notebooks.

Especially because this looks like an nbconvert workflow under the hood.

> Especially because this looks like an nbconvert workflow under the hood.

It is, however I convert it to the most basic html and add custom css and js to it. So that I can change it to whatever I want. I don't see any problem with that maybe you could point some out.

I didn't go with pelican(or any static gen) because the build times will be much slow later on as blogs increase [1] as this guy faced. I like to configure a lot of things manually and don't want the burden of static gen if that make sense to you. I just needed a converter.

1. https://nipunbatra.github.io/blog/2017/Jupyter-powered-blog....

Nice. I have been using gitlab CI and a simple Python script to publish my notes (usually in markdown and Jupyter notebooks) to Gitlab pages. You can find the output on http://avilay.gitlab.io/gyan. And if you want to reuse the code you can find it in https://gitlab.com/avilay/gyan/blob/master/publisher/publish.... Will surely check out your stuff.

I didn't find it responsive though. Maybe not your goal but the designs are similar. Similarly I think you can import nbconvert instead of just calling from subprocess.

Nice, have you looked into jupyter-themes? I've played with it a bit to make a similar notebooks-->static project and it's really great!

I browsed the example link given at the GitHub site, and found this blog entry on lessons to tell your younger self. This post is amazing! All the advice rings true. Worth a read! https://pykancha.github.io/test/2018/cs-phd-lessons.html

Here is original link: https://nipunbatra.github.io/blog/2018/cs-phd-lessons.html

Offtopic; does anyone know a tool that can turn a directory of source code into a nicely formatted PDF/PS? So with syntax highlighting etc based on the file you have and chapter index based on directory structure for instance?

Pandoc? I haven’t used it in a while though.

Did something go wrong here?

https://pykancha.github.io/test/2019/selenium_p1.html

Nope. It was to test my native language for unicode support.

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