Sharing a livebook for guests with sections and other notes

[cr0t]

Hey, I have a theoretical question.

Let's say that we have such a Livebook, and we need to share it with some folks in read-only mode:

We want to present the results of some work that we have done in the frames of this notebook (in forms of texts, graphs, etc.).

Using these settings, we publish the Livebook:

However, in the end we see only the cells' execution results, there are no sections' titles, or Markdown blocks that are in the original document:

Is there any way of publishing a Livebook with its structure?

P.S. Currently, the only one workaround I've found is the usage of Kino.Markdown to render text to the published Livebook. Though, it looks like a hack:

[josevalim]

Correct, the app experience is more about building something that will run later on, rather then presenting results that have been computed in a Livebook. There is an issue about allowing Markdown cells in the apps, which would help address some of this though: #2895

If the results are static, another idea would be to produce a static HTML page other people could run/host, but we don't support it yet.

[josevalim]

For deployed apps you already get a permanent URL, no?

[josevalim]

It sounds like a good idea. Probably, it can be done at the individual cell level, and/or as a global switch for the app: “Leave markdown cells and section titles visible” or something like that.

If we add this, it would be a global switch. If at some point you want to control what shows up individually, then we would be basically reimplementing Kino.Markdown but with fewer features. This is something we want to look at but we need to make sure the deployment screen does not become several different operations, especially once we consider features like #2109.

[cr0t]

For deployed apps you already get a permanent URL, no?

If we introduce changes to the code (to adjust graphs, for example), we have to re-launch the app, and this leads to the changes in the URL:

What if we want to have a permanent URL for end users that always run the latest version? So, we can separate code changes in the Livebook with the actual page that end users can look at.

P.S. This is what I experienced with app publishing, at least: every time I publish the new version of my report, I get the new randomized (session key?) in the URL:

• https://example/apps/cirium-stats/sessions/krvo3serm<...example...>uzzdninkq54o
• https://example/apps/cirium-stats/sessions/krvo3serm<...example...>433auea6kxyh
• etc.

This is not quite convenient for the end users who might want to bookmark the report/post/dashboard page.

[josevalim]

We could have an option that forces all users to go to latest on a new deploy. The issue is that for some apps, like form-based, you don't want to do that, but if you have a dashboard it makes sense that you always want to force latest.

[cr0t]

During the last few days, I tried to grasp how Livebook apps' rendering pipeline works, and ended up with this dirty (proof-of-concept) pull-request.

It's quite a naïve attempt to render Markdown blocks from the original notebook. I used straight :rand.uniform/1 to calculate output IDs.

But this is still something that shows up the idea we discussed above.

Please check the video there. I highlighted the current issues (likely to my limited understanding of the rendering flow):

• images do not render (maybe we need to add some automatic path expanding that use original session's ID – where the static file is available)
• when we update the app, it renders static markdown blocks twice along the alert!

What do you think? Do you like the idea in general? Is there anyone who can help me make it? Any better docs or leads to how rendering in Livebook works?