Livebook embedded in Phoenix Application

[kujua]

I am creating a course with some of the lessons as LiveBook.

What I want to achieve is to display livebooks in the application.

Of course, more advanced developers can deploy Livebook on their machine, but more junior developers may have a problem with that, because to livebook would be in a different server. I would like to have it in the course applicationwithout having to change the Phoenix application.

Is there a way to embed the server in an application? Nerves_livebook does it with a different node and wifi, afai understand it.

So my question is, how to achieve my requirement (if this is possible).

[josevalim]

This is not a flow that we support right now (and it is not a priority at the moment to do so). The best way to run Livebook is via the Desktop app. :)

[niccolox]

@josevalim I think its a bad design decision to create two ecosystems with no synergies

please work on, or at least provide a roadmap for community contributions for LiveBook Phoenix

[josevalim]

Once again, we have no plans for embedding it within. You can run on a separate port if you wish, but we are a small team and each new way of running Livebook besides the desktop, docker, command line is more maintenance work for us. You can call it "bad design", we call it "understanding the requirements and making sure our energy is better applied where it is most useful". :)

[jonatanklosko]

On a sidenote, arguably embedding Livebook directly in the app has a number of concerns.

(a) If the goal is to make it available to end users, then it definitely should run separately from the app, otherwise the users can effectively do anything to the app.

(b) If the goal is to use it as an admin tool, then for a real production app it is better to run it in a separate container (or machine), then use :erpc from Livebook to communicate with the application node (to minimise the interaction with the production node). This way Livebook can have independent memory/cpu and installing packages or doing heavier processing doesn't impact the actual app. On top of that, another configuration some people are using is running Livebook locally and establishing a secure connection to the production (then either use :erpc or use the attached runtime).

So even though there may be a valid scenario that fits into "embedding", it's not necessarily as general purpose as it may seem and something we should be recommending. That's one of the reasons why it hasn't been our focus. People are welcome to explore ideas of integrating Livebook, as was the case with nerves_livebook.