Local widget development with VS Code?

[ibdafna]

Hello folks,

What is the current state of widget development in VS Code? From what I can see, all widgets must have their JS available on a CDN for them to work - this won't be possible for local widget development. What is your suggestion for moving forward? Is there a way to force JS assets to be loaded from the file system?

Many thanks

[DonJayamanne]

Hi @ibdafna

There are two solutions

1. Anywidget
   That works like a charm.

From what I can see, all widgets must have their JS available on a CDN for them to work - this won't be possible for local widget development. What is your suggestion for moving forward? Is there a way to force JS assets to be loaded from the file system?

2. Or when using a local Python environment, then the widget scripts must be available in the nbextensions folder of the current Python environment
   <sysprefix>/share/jupyter/nbextensions/...

Please do let me know if this doesn't work, it should.

[ibdafna]

I used the TS widget cookie cutter: https://github.com/jupyter-widgets/widget-ts-cookiecutter.

[DonJayamanne]

I just tried that and it works without any problems, I didn't have to rename the index.js to extension.js.
Are you on the latest version of VS Code (at least 1.85 and Jupyter 2024.1.*)?

[ibdafna]

Oh my... the plot thickens. I'm on VS Code 1.87.0 with Jupyer 2024.2.0, but I am pretty sure I updated both in the last couple of days. Let me test again and report back!

[ibdafna]

Works for me with the current setup mentioned above (it does look like I was on 1.86.2 when I opened the issue, although not sure about the Jupyter extension version). I'm so sorry, I really did test multiple times before posting here (see screenshot below where it was looking for ../jupyter/myproject.js).

Thank you for your time - and apologies again for the trouble.

[DonJayamanne]

No worries at all,
Thanks for getting back