How to get ipywidgets working in Jupyter Lab?

Question

In Jupyter Notebook, ipywidgets work fine, however they seem to not work in Jupyter Lab (which is supposedly better than Notebook).

I followed these directions.

Answer 1

None of the other answers worked to me. It all seems to be down to version compatibility. Finally got it working - see below. All credit to @hainm on github (original link: https://github.com/jupyter-widgets/ipywidgets/issues/2488#issuecomment-509719214) My SO answer on this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/60059786/1021819 Here is a straight copy of that answer:

Leveraging https://github.com/jupyter-widgets/ipywidgets/issues/2488#issuecomment-509719214, in a jupyterlab terminal - running on jupyterhub - execute:

pythonversion=3.7
labversion=0.34.12
labmanagerversion=0.37.4
ipywidgetsversion=7.4.2

conda install ipywidgets=$ipywidgetsversion -c conda-forge -y --override-channels -c main
conda install jupyterlab=$labversion  -y -c conda-forge --override-channels -c main
jupyter-labextension install @jupyter-widgets/jupyterlab-manager@$labmanagerversion

At this point a jupyter lab clean; jupyter lab build might be of interest.

Then in a .ipynb notebook running in the same jupyterlab window, hit the restart kernel button.

IMPORTANT: Don't forget to also REFRESH the browser page - or all efforts will have been in vain . :\

Then execute the example:

from ipywidgets import interact

@interact(x=(0, 100, 10))
def p(x=50):
    pass

I never thought I would live to see the day but - hey presto - the widget finally appears!

The sad things are that the setup is extremely sensitive to the installation of other extensions and the combination of compatible versions is very specific.