gistwidget

Labs — This is an experimental project. And not recommended for production use.

Share anywidgets via GitHub Gists. Two functions, zero config.

Build a widget in a notebook, publish it to a gist, and anyone can load it back — JS, CSS, Python traitlets and all.

Install

uv add gistwidget
# or
pip install gistwidget

Quickstart

Load a widget someone already published:

import gistwidget

Widget = gistwidget.load("4de49e3627f06804c53d235f004d41c0")
Widget()

Publish your own:

import os
import anywidget
import traitlets
import gistwidget

class CounterWidget(anywidget.AnyWidget):
    _esm = """
    export default {
      render({ model, el }) {
        let btn = document.createElement("button");
        btn.innerText = `Count: ${model.get("count")}`;
        btn.addEventListener("click", () => {
          model.set("count", model.get("count") + 1);
          model.save_changes();
        });
        model.on("change:count", () => {
          btn.innerText = `Count: ${model.get("count")}`;
        });
        el.appendChild(btn);
      }
    };
    """
    count = traitlets.Int(0).tag(sync=True)

result = gistwidget.publish(
    CounterWidget,
    description="Counter widget",
    token=os.getenv("GITHUB_TOKEN"),
)
print(result.html_url)

API

gistwidget.load(gist_id, *, token=None)

Load a widget class from a GitHub Gist.

Returns a type[anywidget.AnyWidget] — the widget class, not an instance. Call it to create one.

gistwidget.publish(widget, *, gist_id=None, description="", public=False, token=None)

Publish a widget to a GitHub Gist.

Returns a GistResult with .gist_id and .html_url.

GistResult

@dataclass
class GistResult:
    gist_id: str
    html_url: str

GistError

Raised on API errors or invalid input. Has an optional .status_code attribute for HTTP errors.

What gets stored in the gist

When loading, all three are reassembled into a working widget class.

Notebooks

The notebooks/ directory contains marimo notebooks:

• load_widget.py — Interactive loader: paste a gist ID, get a live widget
• publish_widget.py — Defines a drawing-canvas widget and publishes it

Development

uv pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest tests/