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Show HN: Mercury – Convert Jupyter notebooks to web apps

runmercury.com

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Show HN: Mercury – Convert Jupyter notebooks to web apps

#1

Post by pplonski86 »

Author here. Mercury is the simplest way to serve your notebooks as web apps. The simplicity of the framework is very important to us. Mercury has some useful features to make sharing easier:

- you can show or hide your code,

- your users can easily export executed notebook to PDF/HTML,

- there is built-in authentication,

- you can produce files in the notebook and make them downloadable,

- you can share multiple notebooks.

We also care about deployment simplicity. That's why we created a shared hosting service called Mercury Cloud. You can deploy notebook by uploading a file. Below clickable links:

The GitHub repository https://github.com/mljar/mercury

Documentation https://RunMercury.com/docs/

Mercury Cloud https://cloud.runmercury.com

Show HN: Mercury – Convert Jupyter notebooks to web apps
runmercury.com

Re: Show HN: Mercury – Convert Jupyter notebooks to web apps

#3

Post by wtatum »

Not (necessarily) relevant to this solution, but I've recently come across a use case where it would be valuable to allow third-party (semi-trusted) individuals to sandbox/build/test some data processing/transformation pipelines in Jupyter and then "operationalize" that into ongoing ETL in my main webapp/API once they're finished. Not the same use case as Mercury but still in the bucket of hoisting a notebook into a more repeatable/operationalizable runtime. Does anyone have experience with something like that?

Re: Show HN: Mercury – Convert Jupyter notebooks to web apps

#4

Post by sireat »

queens_ridge wrote: post #2

Interesting. I wonder how it compares to Voila. What I like about Voila is that you can use ipywidgets natively and then render Jupyter Notebooks directly to a web-app. Maybe this will be a decent competitor.

Mercury certainly seems worthy of keeping an eye out.

Voila is the obvious competitor to this. There are also different oranges and apples such as Dash, Streamlit, Panel: https://anaconda.cloud/dashboardlandscape - obviously Anaconda is a bit biased here.

I suppose the biggest limitation to Mercury is the limited number of widgets. Good for quick demos.

Also deployment is a bit unclear at the moment - I wonder how easy it is to keep Mercury deployed in a separate Docker container - that is I do not want to keep random ports open on my notebook server.

Then again probably deployment/hosting is how Mercury expects to make some money.

Re: Show HN: Mercury – Convert Jupyter notebooks to web apps

#6

Post by pplonski86 »

queens_ridge wrote: post #2

Interesting. I wonder how it compares to Voila. What I like about Voila is that you can use ipywidgets natively and then render Jupyter Notebooks directly to a web-app. Maybe this will be a decent competitor.

Main differences to Voila:

- Mercury has no callbacks - we automatically re-execute cells below updated widget,

- Mercury has no layout widgets, all input widgets are always in the left sidebar and output content appear in the same order as in notebook.

Thanks to above decisions you don't need to rewrite your notebook to fit UI framework paradigms.

Re: Show HN: Mercury – Convert Jupyter notebooks to web apps

#8

Post by queens_ridge »

pplonski86 wrote: post #6
queens_ridge wrote: post #2

Interesting. I wonder how it compares to Voila. What I like about Voila is that you can use ipywidgets natively and then render Jupyter Notebooks directly to a web-app. Maybe this will be a decent competitor.

Main differences to Voila: - Mercury has no callbacks - we automatically re-execute cells below updated widget, - Mercury has no layout widgets, all input widgets are always in the left sidebar and output content appear in the same order as in notebook. Thanks to above decisions you don't need to rewrite your notebook to fit UI framework paradigms.

That's great to hear. Voila is easy to use but I've always found difficulty make the UI look clean. Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Mercury – Convert Jupyter notebooks to web apps

#9

Post by pplonski86 »

sireat wrote: post #4
queens_ridge wrote: post #2

Interesting. I wonder how it compares to Voila. What I like about Voila is that you can use ipywidgets natively and then render Jupyter Notebooks directly to a web-app. Maybe this will be a decent competitor.

Mercury certainly seems worthy of keeping an eye out. Voila is the obvious competitor to this. There are also different oranges and apples such as Dash, Streamlit, Panel: https://anaconda.cloud/dashboardlandscape - obviously Anaconda is a bit biased here. I suppose the biggest limitation to Mercury is the limited number of widgets. Good for quick demos. Also deployment is a bit unclear at the moment - I wonder how ea…

Mercury is for quick demos. It is not a full web framework. The simplicity of the framework is very important for us.

We hope to extend widgets offering in the near future.

You are right. We are working on Mercury Cloud service where you can just upload notebook to deploy it. We have free and paid plans. But you can also self-host Mercury with docker-compose.

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