Using Thebe to run code on CoCalc?

[mforbes]

How hard would it be to configure and use Thebe or something similar to allow code hosted on either CoCalc or ReadTheDocs etc. to launch and execute on CoCalc instead of MyBinder?

I am just starting to explore this, so don't know what all is required. Has anyone thought about something similar? (I would really like to be able to host Jupyter Books, not just notebooks.)

Currently, there are lots of things hard-coded (i.e. repo must be hosted on GitHub, kernel information etc.) but it seems like it should not be too hard to update/change as needed.

References

• Thebe documentation
• sphinx-thebe extension documentation
• Jupyter Book interactive code example

[haraldschilly]

I don't know thebe. CoCalc already allows to execute code blocks embedded in markdown or just straight a published jupyter notebook, when shared on the public server → example.

Maybe it is possible to run generated markdown of Jupyter Books directly? (or if not, to come up with a plugin for it, to make it work?)

Technically, it is possible to run any kind of server on your own using a compute server, though.

[mforbes]

The idea is a little different than what CoCalc does for published notebooks in that one would need to spawn a kernel (like mybinder does) where the cells in the notebook/markdown file could be executed. It is not enough to just push each cell - the intermediate state needs to be maintained so users can play. (I suppose that the entire notebook could be re-executed on code-changes, which would then fit the current CoCalc model, but that would probably not be so good from a user's perspective if the notebook contained substantial code.)

What I would like to be able to do is to be able to use one's CoCalc license to run a kernel with more resources than mybinder, for example. Of course, this could be done by having users install the jupyterbook in a project, then run it with a compute server as you describe, but I would like to try to automate this as much as possible so that students, for example, can just click a button on the docs, sign into CoCalc, and then play with the code.

I am also thinking of this as a good way to attract people to CoCalc.

Ultimately, once CoCalc supports Myst stuff in the Markdown editor, it will probably be possible to get a good rendition there (though there is something appealing to having users able to play with code without changing the documentation parts for education purposes.)