How to run OpenAI Gym .render() over a server

Question

I am running a python 2.7 script on a p2.xlarge AWS server through Jupyter (Ubuntu 14.04). I would like to be able to render my simulations.

Minimal working example<

Answer 1

Referencing my other answer here: Display OpenAI gym in Jupyter notebook only

I made a quick working example here which you could fork: https://kyso.io/eoin/openai-gym-jupyter with two examples of rendering in Jupyter - one as an mp4, and another as a realtime gif.

The .mp4 example is quite simple.

import gym
from gym import wrappers

env = gym.make('SpaceInvaders-v0')
env = wrappers.Monitor(env, "./gym-results", force=True)
env.reset()
for _ in range(1000):
    action = env.action_space.sample()
    observation, reward, done, info = env.step(action)
    if done: break
env.close()

Then in a new cell Jupyter cell, or download it from the server onto some place where you can view the video.

import io
import base64
from IPython.display import HTML

video = io.open('./gym-results/openaigym.video.%s.video000000.mp4' % env.file_infix, 'r+b').read()
encoded = base64.b64encode(video)
HTML(data='''
    '''
.format(encoded.decode('ascii')))

If your on a server with public access you could run python -m http.server in the gym-results folder and just watch the videos there.