How to get ipywidgets working in Jupyter Lab?

Question

In Jupyter Notebook, ipywidgets work fine, however they seem to not work in Jupyter Lab (which is supposedly better than Notebook).

I followed these directions.

Step 1: Installed Node.js (https://nodejs.org/en/)

Step 2: Installed requirements on Python 3 with conda:

conda install -c conda-forge ipywidgets
jupyter labextension install @jupyter-widgets/jupyterlab-manager

Unfortunately, basic widgets do not work inside the jupyter lab notebook:

Answer 1

None of the other answers worked to me. It all seems to be down to version compatibility. Finally got it working - see below. All credit to @hainm on github (original link: https://github.com/jupyter-widgets/ipywidgets/issues/2488#issuecomment-509719214) My SO answer on this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/60059786/1021819 Here is a straight copy of that answer:

Leveraging https://github.com/jupyter-widgets/ipywidgets/issues/2488#issuecomment-509719214, in a jupyterlab terminal - running on jupyterhub - execute:

pythonversion=3.7
labversion=0.34.12
labmanagerversion=0.37.4
ipywidgetsversion=7.4.2

conda install ipywidgets=$ipywidgetsversion -c conda-forge -y --override-channels -c main
conda install jupyterlab=$labversion  -y -c conda-forge --override-channels -c main
jupyter-labextension install @jupyter-widgets/jupyterlab-manager@$labmanagerversion

At this point a jupyter lab clean; jupyter lab build might be of interest.

Then in a .ipynb notebook running in the same jupyterlab window, hit the restart kernel button.

IMPORTANT: Don't forget to also REFRESH the browser page - or all efforts will have been in vain . :\

Then execute the example:

from ipywidgets import interact

@interact(x=(0, 100, 10))
def p(x=50):
    pass

I never thought I would live to see the day but - hey presto - the widget finally appears!

The sad things are that the setup is extremely sensitive to the installation of other extensions and the combination of compatible versions is very specific.

Answer 2

I had the same pbm, and tried this solution (hope it can help others):

The jupyter labextension install @jupyter-widgets/jupyterlab-manager gave this kind of error in my case:

> /Users/user/.nvm/versions/node/v8.7.0/bin/npm pack @jupyter-widgets/jupyterlab-manager
jupyter-widgets-jupyterlab-manager-0.35.0.tgz

Errored, use --debug for full output:
ValueError:
"@jupyter-widgets/jupyterlab-manager@0.35.0" is not compatible with the current JupyterLab
Conflicting Dependencies:
JupyterLab              Extension            Package
>=0.15.4-0 <0.16.0-0    >=0.16.0-0 <0.17.0-0 @jupyterlab/application
>=1.1.4-0 <2.0.0-0      >=2.0.0-0 <3.0.0-0   @jupyterlab/services
>=0.15.4-0 <0.16.0-0    >=0.16.0-0 <0.17.0-0 @jupyterlab/rendermime
>=0.15.4-0 <0.16.0-0    >=0.16.0-0 <0.17.0-0 @jupyterlab/notebook

Then, what I did is to use a previous version 0.34 instead of 0.35: jupyter labextension install @jupyter-widgets/jupyterlab-manager@0.34

In fact, according to this, sometime teams get time to consider the last version.

UP (according to comments): You can check jupyter lab --version and find match on its version compatibility.

And it works now !

Answer 3

JupyterLab now prefers a model where arbitrary javascript is no longer allowed to be embedded in a cell's output, which is how many interactive Jupyter Notebook modules used to work. They now ask that modules with interactivity create a JupyterLab extension. IPyWidgets has an extension that can be activated by running this on your command line (which assumes you already have NodeJS installed):

jupyter labextension install @jupyter-widgets/jupyterlab-manager

Answer 4

Had the same issue, and what worked for me today was running the 'clean' command, as mentioned here: https://ipywidgets.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user_install.html#installing-the-jupyterlab-extension

So:

jupyter lab clean
jupyter labextension install @jupyter-widgets/jupyterlab-manager

And that got it working right for me just now.

Answer 5

I was getting a Permission Denied error, so adding sudo to the accepted command helped: sudo jupyter labextension install @jupyter-widgets/jupyterlab-manager.