sandbox-widget

A Jupyter cell magic that runs a cell in a fresh, isolated namespace and shows everything it produced -- stdout, stderr, rich display output, any exception -- in a shaded box below the cell, built on anywidget.

import sandbox_widget  # registers the %%exercise cell magic

%%exercise
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.plot([1, 2, 3])

Nothing the cell defines or imports persists past that one run, and nothing the notebook has already defined is visible to it -- except through the cell's own import/from ... import statements. Because Python caches loaded modules in sys.modules, such an import is essentially free and hands back the exact same live object the notebook already has (the same plt, with the same open figures; the same model, with the same weights) -- nothing is reloaded or reinitialized, and no kernel restart happens.

Installation

# pixi
pixi workspace channel add munch-group
pixi add sandbox-widget

# conda
conda install -c munch-group sandbox-widget

# pip
pip install sandbox-widget

Writing a %%exercise cell

• Anything the cell needs -- a library, a model, a helper function -- must be imported by the cell itself. Plain notebook variables with no import path (e.g. a dataframe built inline two cells up) aren't visible.
• A trailing bare expression is displayed, exactly like a normal cell (a + b, or a variable's name on its own); an assignment as the last line still runs, but produces no comparable output.

Documentation

Full docs live at munch-group.org/script-widget.

Development

This repo is managed with pixi:

pixi run install-dev   # editable install into the pixi environment
pixi run test          # run the pytest suite
pixi run docs          # execute the documentation notebooks
pixi run api           # build the quartodoc API reference

License

MIT