shinywidgets

Render ipywidgets inside a Shiny app.

Installation

pip install shinywidgets

Overview

See the using ipywidgets section of the Shiny for Python website.

Frequently asked questions

What ipywidgets are supported?

In theory, shinywidgets supports any instance that inherits from {ipywidgets}' Widget class. That is, if isinstance(obj, ipywidgets.widgets.Widget) returns True for some object obj, then {shinywidgets} should be able to render it.

{shinywidgets} can also render objects that don't inherit from Widget, but have a known way of coercing into a Widget instance. This list currently includes:

• Altair charts (i.e., altair.Chart() instances).
• Plotly figures (i.e., plotly.go.Figure())
• Pydeck's Deck class (via it's .show() method).
• Bokeh widgets (via the jupyter_bokeh package).
  • Bokeh widgets are a bit of a special case, as they require some extra setup to work in Shiny. See the Bokeh widgets aren't displaying, what gives? section below for more details.

See here for more details on how these objects are coerced into Widget instances, and if you know of other packages that should be added to this list, please let us know.

Bokeh setup

Similar to how you have to run bokeh.io.output_notebook() to run {bokeh} in notebook, you also have to explicitly bring the JS/CSS dependencies to the Shiny app, which can be done this way:

from shiny import ui
from shinywidgets import bokeh_dependencies

app_ui = ui.page_fluid(
    bokeh_dependencies(),
    # ...
)

Does {shinywidgets} work with Shinylive?

To some extent, yes. As shown on the official shinylive examples, packages like plotly and ipyleaflet work (as long as you've provided the proper dependencies in a requirements.txt file), but other packages like altair and qgrid may not work (at least currently) due to missing wheel files and/or dependencies with compiled code that can't be compiled to WebAssembly.

How do I size the widget?

{ipywidgets}' Widget class has it's own API for setting inline CSS styles, including height and width. So, given a Widget instance w, you should be able to do something like:

w.layout.height = "100%"
w.layout.width = "100%"

How do I hide/show a widget?

As mentioned above, a Widget class should have a layout attribute, which can be used to set all sorts of CSS styles, including display and visibility. So, if you wanted to hide a widget and still have space allocated for it:

w.layout.visibility = "hidden"

Or, to not give it any space:

w.layout.display = "none"

Can I render widgets that contain other widgets?

Yes! In fact this a crucial aspect to how packages like {ipyleaflet} work. In {ipyleaflet}'s case, each individual marker is a widget which gets attached to a Map() via .add_layer().

Troubleshooting

If after installing {shinywidgets}, you have trouble rendering widgets, first try running the "hello world" ipywidgets example. If that doesn't work, it could be that you have an unsupported version of a dependency like {ipywidgets} or {shiny}.

If you can run the "hello world" example, but "3rd party" widget(s) don't work, first check that the extension is properly configured with jupyter nbextension list. Even if the extension is properly configured, it still may not work right away, especially if that widget requires initialization code in a notebook environment. In this case, {shinywidgets} probably won't work without providing the equivalent setup information to Shiny. Some known cases of this are:

Development

If you want to do development on {shinywidgets}, run:

pip install -e ".[dev,test]"
cd js && yarn watch