Broken ipywidgets interactivity in the Lorenz demo

[pierre-haessig]

This is a cross-post of the jupyterlite/pyodide-kernel#133 issue filed in the pyodide-kernel repo, to serve as a placeholder.

The specific symptom for try-jupyter is that the interactivity of the Lorenz attractor demo is broken. There is some strange/erratic behavior of ipywidgets inside JupyterLite which seemingly appeared this summer 2024.

[jtpio]

Thanks @pierre-haessig for the report.

Also linking to jupyterlite/jupyterlite#1465 which looks related.

[jtpio]

Wondering if this could be related to an ipywidgets release made this summer, which broke the use of interactive in JupyterLite.

[pierre-haessig]

Thanks @pierre-haessig for the report.

Also linking to jupyterlite/jupyterlite#1465 which looks related.

Same symptoms indeed. Now that there a bug report for every jupyterlite-related repo!

[pierre-haessig]

Wondering if this could be related to an ipywidgets release made this summer, which broke the use of interactive in JupyterLite.

Good question! Then only think I'm sure of is that ipywidgets still works in non jupyterlite environment.

[jtpio]

Maybe it could be worth trying with ipywidgets<8.1.3? To check if this could be caused by jupyter-widgets/ipywidgets#3004, which changed a bit how the widgets are rendered in JupyterLab (and JupyterLite).

[pierre-haessig]

Maybe it could be worth trying with ipywidgets<8.1.3? To check if this could be caused by jupyter-widgets/ipywidgets#3004, which changed a bit how the widgets are rendered in JupyterLab (and JupyterLite).

Good idea, but since pyodide bundles many packages in its distribution, is it just enough to change ipywidgets in requirements.txt? That is changing requirements to:

# Core modules (mandatory) → unchanged
jupyterlite-core==0.4.1
jupyterlab~=4.2.5
notebook~=7.2.2

# Python kernel (optional) → unchanged
jupyterlite-pyodide-kernel==0.4.2

....

# Python: ipywidget library for Jupyter notebooks (optional)
ipywidgets<8.1.3 # instead of ">=8.1.3,<9"

By the way, in try-jupyter, despite the fact it derives from jupyterlite/demo, I don't find requirements.txt but rather environment.yml. Is it interchangeable?

[jtpio]

Yes, and maybe we can also try pinning jupyterlab-widgets to an older version. Also in the notebook update the cell to:

%pip install ipywidgets==8.1.2

By the way, in try-jupyter, despite the fact it derives from jupyterlite/demo, I don't find requirements.txt but rather environment.yml. Is it interchangeable?

Right, it's also fine to install dependencies in the build environment with conda / mamba, using an environment.yml.

[pierre-haessig]

Yes, and maybe we can also try pinning jupyterlab-widgets to an older version

but I don't see jupyterlab-widgets in the in requirements.txt...

[jtpio]

Right, it's a dependency of ipywidgets, but since ipywidgets defines the dependency as jupyterlab_widgets~=3.0.12 currently, it will likely grab a newer version even when pinning ipywidgets.

[pierre-haessig]

Right, it's a dependency of ipywidgets, but since ipywidgets defines the dependency as jupyterlab_widgets~=3.0.12 currently, it will likely grab a newer version even when pinning ipywidgets

Do you mean that the version pinning should be done at the pip install stage with

%pip install ipywidgets==8.1.2 jupyterlab_widgets==3.0.12

(along with ipywidgets<8.1.3 in the requirements) or would it be too late in the pipeline?

[jtpio]

I meant pinning jupyterlab_widgets in requirements.txt. In the notebook we only need to install ipywidgets.

[pierre-haessig]

OK, this is what I put in the requirements: https://github.com/pierre-haessig/pierre-notebooks/blob/main/requirements.txt

and here is the result: https://pierre-haessig.github.io/pierre-notebooks/lab/index.html?path=Frequency+regulation+nocode.ipynb

I rushed the test, so perhaps I missed something (normally I cleared browser cache, but sometimes...).

Also, what I don't understand is that

import ipywidgets
ipywidgets.__version__

report '8.1.5' despite https://github.com/pierre-haessig/pierre-notebooks/blob/main/requirements.txt

[bdcodebase]

If you need a workaround: Going back to Jupyterlite 0.3.0 made my interactive scripts work again. Some modules need to be installed on build side and on runtime side (see https://jupyterlite.readthedocs.io/en/stable/howto/configure/simple_extensions.html), which might result in different verions. As there is anonther issue with broken paths for widgetsnbextension (see jupyterlite/jupyterlite#1342), I added a requirements.txt on runtime side as well ("runtime-requirements.txt"), and use it to install the missing modules on runtime, without the need to adapt all scripts when something is changing again. See https://bdcodebase.github.io/JLdeployments/lab/index.html?path=DFT.ipynb for a (at least currently) working example.