Skipping cells during execution

[amardeep]

It would be good to have a way to skip certain cells during execution of jupyter notebooks.

My use case is that it is useful to have extra cells which might be useful for a developer while debugging or during interactive development - but shouldn't be run in regular runs.

But there are other scenarios discussed in the thread here:
nteract/papermill#429

[edublancas]

I quickly skimmed through papermill's issue. looks like the community is in favor of a remove feature instead of a skip one since skipping will create non-linearly executed notebooks.

I think we can start with a simple implementation and improve it with community feedback: we can have the executor remove cells tagged with a specific tag and then execute the notebook. Would this work for you?

Something like:

ploomber-engine input.ipynb output.ipynb --remove-tagged-cells some-tag

[idomic]

Maybe worth making it static so you don't need to pass it as a var each time..

ploomber-engine input.ipynb output.ipynb

And in input.ipynb mark those cells with a remove tag.

[edublancas]

Maybe worth making it static so you don't need to pass it as a var each time..

I thought the same at the beginning, but since this will affect the execution flow, I think it's better to be explicit.

[idomic]

We should do it explicitly, and then make sure we support an external file or an env variable so users don't have to repeat those multiple times.

[edublancas]

external file or an env variable

this is more work than just the remove feature so I think we should split in two issues. this one should only cover the cell removing part.

[idomic]

Yeah, I'll reference a new issue.

[amardeep]

I quickly skimmed through papermill's issue. looks like the community is in favor of a remove feature instead of a skip one since skipping will create non-linearly executed notebooks.

I think we can start with a simple implementation and improve it with community feedback: we can have the executor remove cells tagged with a specific tag and then execute the notebook. Would this work for you?

Something like:

ploomber-engine input.ipynb output.ipynb --remove-tagged-cells some-tag

Yes, that works. Thank you.

[edublancas]

released in version 0.0.21!