ParameterizedNotebooks

Turn a Jupyter notebook into general purpose Julia function which can be run repeatedly from the same or other Julia sessions with different input arguments.

Install

Needs nbconvert:

pip install nbconvert

Then from the Julia package prompt:

pkg> add https://github.com/marius311/ParameterizedNotebooks.jl.git

Usage

Best demonstrated with an example:

There are no limitations whatsoever on what the notebook contains or how complex it is, only that the arguments which will be parameterized over are marked with @arg name = val. The @arg macro does nothing special when running the notebook normally in Jupyter, so above seed is set to 1 and execution proceeds as usual.

You can mark code which should only run in Jupyter but will otherwise be skipped in the parameterized call (e.g. visualization) with @nbonly.

You can return a value from the notebook with the @ret macro. @ret is also useful to return the parameterized call somewhere before the end of your notebook. Code cells below this are not run and can contain other code, even triggering the parameterized call itself from the same kernel/notebook, as in the above example.

Details

The package is extremely simple and just reads the notebook file from disk and repeatedly eval's each cell into Main (just as if you had run the cells, thus avoiding any scoping issues), replacing @arg expressions with the appropriate value, skipping @nbonly expressions, and returning once it hits a @ret.

Similar to takluyver/nbparameterise, tritemio/nbrun, and nteract/papermill, but more powerful because arbitrary objects, not just string representations, can be passed as parameters and returned from the notebooks. Also, much simpler to use and only requires decorating a few lines with macros. However, lacks the ability to generate "reports" with outputs filled in.