manual_teachbooks/book/features/live_code.md

Python-enabled interactivity

Our book has been enable to run Python code live in the browser (thanks Max!). This page contains some installation instructions and the other sections show how to use this functionality to create interactive figures and feedback on code

Setting up Python live coding

To set up the Python live coding you need to add our own sphinx-thebe extension to your book. The original sphinx thebe extension doesn't run smoothly and reliable. Therefore, you need to add some lines to requirements.txt and _config.yml

For requirements.txt add the following lines: https://gitlab.tudelft.nl/interactivetextbooks-citg/extensions/sphinx-thebe

--extra-index-url https://gitlab.tudelft.nl/api/v4/projects/11239/packages/pypi/simple
sphinx-thebe == 0.2.1000

This will download the correct version of the sphinx extension when the book is build on the server (which loads the required packages from requirements.txt)

Afterwards, this sphinx extension needs to be enabled in your book. This can be done by adding the following lines to _config.yml:

launch_buttons:
  thebe: true

sphinx:
    html_js_files:
    - https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/require.js/2.3.4/require.min.js
    thebe_config:
      use_thebe_lite: true
      exclude_patterns: ["**/_*.yml", "**/*.md", "**/*.ipynb"]

By launch_buttons you initiate the {fa}rocket --> {guilabel}Live Code on the top right corner of every page generated from a .ipynb file. The html_js_files link calls for some required javascript files. use_thebe_lite makes sure you initiate our adapted sphinx thebe extensions. The exclude_patterns makes sure you import all files so that they can be called for from your code, except for the files matching the patterns shown.

Instructions: local build

To test the fuctionality, you have to run a local server, otherwise the interactivity doens't work. So, you cannot just open the index.html file any more. This can be done with the following steps:

1. build the book by running the shell script build-book.sh (type ./build-book.sh true in the terminal). If you are using Windows you should use the Git Bash terminal. Set this as your default in VS Code, then open it using "New Terminal." If you have not already done so, you will need to allow Git Bash to use your Python libraries by running the command conda init bash.Run the shell script from book/ (not book/book/) using ./build-book.sh. You may notice that build-book.sh creates a Python server (python -m http.server....) if you include true in the command.; this is critical for getting the interactive code pages to work, you cannot just open the index.html file any more.
2. Open the book by going to http://127.0.0.1:8000/ in your browser. You may need to reload the page once the rebuild is complete. You can do this on Chrome by right-clicking somewhere on the page, select "Inspect", open the "Network" tab, then reload with CTRL+R. Or try ctrl+F5
3. Go to any page that is created from a Jupyter notebook
4. In the top right, click "Live Code" in the rocket ship menu item ({fa}rocket)
5. Once the message "Python interaction ready!" is displayed, you can run all the cells of the notebook!

If you push to main, you can test the interactivity on the book-draft website as well.

Custom cell tags

With the extended functionality of live code, additional cell tags have been developed to be added to cells in any .ipynb file, next to the [existing tags] of the jupyter book (https://jupyterbook.org/en/stable/content/metadata.html):

• disable-execution-cell disables the ability to execute the cell when thebe is activated. This might be useful if you notebook file includes interactivity for only a part of the coding cells
• disable-execution-page disables the ability to execute the entire page. This might be useful if you use python code for creating a page, but the code is not part of the actual content of the book.
• auto-execute-page automatically starts the thebe live coding functionality whenever the page is opened. This is particularly useful if you're using widgets on a page. At this moment, this tags doesn't work in combination with thebe-remove-input-init
• thebe-init directly starts running this cell as soon as the thebe live coding functionality starts.
• thebe-remove-input-init, as thebe-init, starts the cell directly as soon as the thebe live coding functionality starts. However, the input is not shown to the students (in static and interactive mode). The original remove-input tag will not work as it deletes the entire cell, so it can never be executed.
• keep-output keep the pre-existing output of a cell of which the input is hidden using remove-input.