anywidget

About

anywidget is both a specification and toolkit for authoring reusable web-based widgets for interactive computing environments.

• 🛠️ create custom Jupyter Widgets without complicated cookiecutter templates
• 📚 publish to PyPI like any other Python package
• 🤖 prototype within .ipynb or .py files
• 🚀 run in Jupyter, JupyterLab, Google Colab, VSCode, marimo and more
• ⚡ develop with instant HMR, like modern web frameworks

Learn more in the Jupyter blog.

Installation

anywidget is available on PyPI:

pip install "anywidget[dev]"

and also on conda-forge:

conda install -c conda-forge anywidget

Usage

The easiest way to start developing with anywidget is with the Python package.

import anywidget
import traitlets

class CounterWidget(anywidget.AnyWidget):
    # Widget front-end JavaScript code
    _esm = """
    function render({ model, el }) {
      let button = document.createElement("button");
      button.innerHTML = `count is ${model.get("value")}`;
      button.addEventListener("click", () => {
        model.set("value", model.get("value") + 1);
        model.save_changes();
      });
      model.on("change:value", () => {
        button.innerHTML = `count is ${model.get("value")}`;
      });
      el.appendChild(button);
    }
    export default { render };
    """
    # Stateful property that can be accessed by JavaScript & Python
    value = traitlets.Int(0).tag(sync=True)

Front-end code can also live in separate files (recommend):

import pathlib
import anywidget
import traitlets

class CounterWidget(anywidget.AnyWidget):
    _esm = pathlib.Path("index.js")
    _css = pathlib.Path("styles.css")
    value = traitlets.Int(0).tag(sync=True)

Read the documentation to learn more.

Packages

Beyond the primary Python package, anywidget provides an ecosystem of tooling to help you build and distribute custom widgets.

Name	Description	Version (click for changelogs)
anywidget	Primary Python package
npm:@anywidget/types	Client type declarations
npm:@anywidget/vite	Vite plugin
npm:@anywidget/react	React framework bridge
npm:@anywidget/svelte	Svelte framework bridge
npm:create-anywidget	CLI to bootstrap a new project
jsr:@anywidget/deno	Backend for Deno Jupyter kernel
jsr:@anywidget/signals	Signals bridge

Support

Having trouble? Get help in our Discord or open a Discussion.

Contributing

New contributors welcome! Check out our Contributors Guide for help getting started.

Join us on Discord to meet other maintainers. We'll help you get your first contribution in no time!

Citation

If you use anywidget in your work, please consider citing the following publications:

Our JOSS paper describing the overall project and vision:

@article{manz2024anywidget,
  title = {anywidget: reusable widgets for interactive analysis and visualization in computational notebooks},
  volume = {9},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.06939},
  doi = {10.21105/joss.06939},
  number = {102},
  journal = {Journal of Open Source Software},
  author = {Manz, Trevor and Abdennur, Nezar and Gehlenborg, Nils},
  year = {2024},
  note = {Publisher: The Open Journal},
  pages = {6939},
}

Our SciPy paper, detailing the motivation and approach behind Jupyter Widget ecosystem compatibility:

@inproceedings{manz2024notebooks,
  title = {Any notebook served: authoring and sharing reusable interactive widgets},
  copyright = {https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.25080/NRPV2311},
  doi = {10.25080/NRPV2311},
  urldate = {2024-10-07},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 23rd {Python} in {Science} {Conference}},
  author = {Manz, Trevor and Gehlenborg, Nils and Abdennur, Nezar},
  month = jul,
  year = {2024},
}