Jupyterlab extension to add a button to save the notebook and launch a command

JupyterLab extensions
1

To produce a static presentation from a notebook pres.ipynb, I run a command like

jupyter-nbconvert pres.ipynb \
    --to slides --no-input --SlidesExporter.reveal_scroll=True \
    --SlidesExporter.reveal_number=c/t \
  && sed -i 's$<meta charset="utf-8" />$<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />$g' pres.slides.html

In practice, I do that with a Makefile. First, I need to save the notebook in Jupyterlab and then, switch to a terminal and run make.

This process is quite inconvenient and it would be great to have a button to save the notebook and run a particular command (better if it can be saved in the notebook) to do something with the notebook.

I didn’t find an extension to do that. Does something like that already exist? If not, would it be not too difficult to develop such extension?

2

It looks like this can be done by developing an extension. There is an example of adding a button to the Toolbar in the tutorial; when the button is pressed you could send a request to the server side part of the extension, which would execute the command.

1 Like
3

Thanks for the reply.

For the record, the example on how to add a button in the notebook toolbar is here

To write this extension, I would need to implement the function called when the new button is clicked. The steps are

  • save the notebook
  • read the metadata of the notebook where should be written (by the user) the command to be executed (with nice logging if the command is not found)
  • execute the command on the server (with nice logging on error)

It seems doable but it’s not evident to me how to do that (especially because I don’t know JS/TypeScript). I’m going to look into the examples and documentations but some hints would be very appreciated :slight_smile: