How can I share Jupyter notebooks with non-programmers?
I am trying to wrap my head around what I can/cannot do with Jupyter.
I have a Jupyter server running on our internal server, accessible via VPN and password protected.
I am the only one actually creating notebooks but I would like to make some notebooks visible to other team members in a read-only way. Ideally I could just share a URL with them that they would bookmark for when they want to see the notebook with refreshed data.
I saw export options but cannot find any mention of "publishing" or "making public" local live notebooks. Is this impossible? Is it maybe just a wrong way to think about how Jupyter should be used?
Answer
The "best" way to share a Jupyter notebook is to simply to place it on GitHub (and view it directly) or some other public link and use the Jupyter Notebook Viewer. When privacy is more of an issue then there are alternatives but it's certainly more complex; there's no built-in way to do this in Jupyter alone, but a couple of options are:
Host your own nbviewer
GitHub and the Jupyter Notebook Veiwer both use the same tool to render .ipynb files into static HTML, this tool is nbviewer.
The installation instructions are more complex than I'm willing to go into here but if your company/team has a shared server that doesn't require password access then you could host the nbviewer on that server and direct it to load from your credentialed server. This will probably require some more advanced configuration than you're going to find in the docs.
Set up a deployment script
If you don't necessarily need live updating HTML then you could set up a script on your credentialed server that will simply use Jupyter's built-in export options to create the static HTML files and then send those to a more publicly accessible server.