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Comment by slorber | Hacker News Reader

Hey, Docusaurus maintainer here.

I'm not sure to understand what you mean by "Docusaurus is static". Docusaurus builds static pages and allows you to plug JS/React code anywhere in your docs, so it's quite interactive and can run anything that can run in a browser, including REPLs.

I read the Fly article but still don't really understand what Livebook is about. They say they use Livebook themselves, but the examples linked to only display a regular non-interactive doc to me.

Do you have any production url showing me an experience that is possible in Livebook, and impossible in Docusaurus?

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Sure, here's a simple demonstration of what livebook can do that docusaurus cannot, at least without maintainer expertise ;)

Imagine the following.

<here's a code block containing project metadata>

we click a play button to start an elixir runtime based on that metadata code block

<here's a "component" that securely connects to an elixir system running in a kubernetes pod in production, exposing an elixir REPL to interact with it>

with this component, we then issue commands to inspect state, manage elixir "processes" in the runtime, etc

> we click a play button to start an elixir runtime based on that metadata code block

Can you show a concrete example? IE a real production url running this?

What is "metadata"?

In Docusaurus you can have a live playground evaluating on your browser, or you can embed any embeddable playground if it requires a server integration.

> with this component, we then issue commands to inspect state, manage elixir "processes" in the runtime, etc

Another example would be useful.

So this is just an embedded widget to interact with something remote? Why can't this be built as a React component that you can add to any Docusaurus page?

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It looks to me that you don't need maintainer knowledge to build that, and React knowledge is enough.

Not to be rude. The live playground probably can’t run elixir/erlang code. And it most certainly cannot connect to a remote running node instance. It’s unfortunate, that the angle here is documentation since, while Livebooks are great for testing and documentation ( https://blog.appsignal.com/2022/05/24/livebook-for-elixir-ju... ), they also provide a great environment for experimenting with elixir code. I’m sure docausorus is great, I’m not sure why you would think Livebooks would be a competitor in the same space. As to you asking for in production links, I’d encourage you to install it and test it for yourself.

here's a recent video recording of the author of Elixir showcasing some latest releases for Livebook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSjryA1iFng

The code blocks need to be run in sequence, from top-down, as one builds on the next. The "metadata" at the very top often describes the project and its dependencies.

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