BulletJournal

BulletJournal is a notebook orchestration platform for reproducible data science. It layers explicit artifact passing, persistent graph state, stale detection, checkpoints, and managed execution on top of Marimo notebooks.

For multi-project orchestration with separated environments through Docker containers, see BulletJournal-Controller.

DISCLAIMER: This project is part of an experiment to evaluate the potential of AI tooling for software engineering. Most of the code in this repo was produced by an LLM and may not offer the same security or robustness as human-written code. Please don't deploy it in a critical production environment without isolation, especially given that the project was made to run user-provided Python code.

Requirements

• Python 3.11+
• A dedicated environment is recommended (uv or venv)

Quickstart

pip install bulletjournal-editor
bulletjournal init testproject
bulletjournal init /project --project-id study-a --skip-environment
bulletjournal start testproject --open

If you are already inside a project root, running bulletjournal with no subcommand starts the app.

Common commands

bulletjournal init testproject
bulletjournal init testproject --project-id custom-id
bulletjournal init /project --project-id study-a --skip-environment
bulletjournal start .
bulletjournal dev . --open
bulletjournal doctor .
bulletjournal validate-templates
bulletjournal rebuild-state .
bulletjournal mark-environment-changed . --reason "dependencies updated"
bulletjournal export . testproject.zip
bulletjournal import testproject.zip restored-study

Project layout

project_root/
├─ graph/
│  ├─ meta.json
│  ├─ nodes.json
│  ├─ edges.json
│  └─ layout.json
├─ notebooks/
├─ objects/
├─ dashboards/
├─ metadata/
│  ├─ project.json
│  └─ state.db
├─ checkpoints/
├─ temp/
│  ├─ uploads/
│  ├─ execution_logs/
│  └─ worker/
├─ pyproject.toml
└─ uv.lock

BulletJournal owns the project layout and schema files under graph/, metadata/, objects/, dashboards/, checkpoints/, and temp/.

pyproject.toml and uv.lock define the project environment, but they can be managed externally. Use bulletjournal init ... --skip-environment when another controller is responsible for environment definition and install orchestration.

bulletjournal init is safe to rerun. It leaves valid existing layout files in place, recreates missing required directories and runtime directories, fails on unsupported schema versions, and never overwrites existing pyproject.toml or uv.lock when --skip-environment is used.

Docs

• docs/EXECUTION_PLAN.md
• docs/ARCHITECTURE.md
• docs/PROJECT_FORMAT.md
• docs/NOTEBOOK_AUTHORING.md
• docs/API.md
• docs/TEMPLATES.md
• docs/OPERATIONS.md
• docs/ARTIFACT_LIFECYCLE.md
• docs/TROUBLESHOOTING.md

Testing

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"
PYTHONPATH=src python -m pytest

The default pytest configuration runs four workers with a fixed randomized order (--randomly-seed=42). Override these defaults with additional pytest options when diagnosing a failure, for example -n 0 for serial execution.

Pre-commit

ruff.toml is consumed by ruff automatically from the repo root. To enable the git hook:

pre-commit install