Knowing if ipynb is run from Jupyter or nbconvert

[quertenmont]

Hello,

Is there a way to detect from a notebook cell whether the code is being run from a jupyter notebook or from a nbconvert command.
I would like to decide how to render some graphics based on this flag

• if in jupyter I would use interactive (HTML/JS/D3) type of graphics
• if from nbconvert I would use matplotlib that could be exported to PDF.

Thanks in advance for your help,
Loic

[takluyver]

Sorry, by design there isn't - we expect nbconvert to produce similar results whether it's using saved outputs in the notebook, or generating new outputs by re-executing it. If you're using nbconvert as part of a pipeline you control, you could set an environment variable and check it in your code to switch behaviour.

[quertenmont]

Can't I get some info by executing some javascript to get the page URL for instance ?

[takluyver]

Not very reliably, because of the asynchronous nature of Javascript.

[JarnoRFB]

you could set an environment variable and check it in your code to switch behaviour

would it be bad for nbconvert to set this environment variable itself? That would be convenient.

[cunnane]

Agree with @JarnoRFB here - whilst I appreciate the design philosophy of having nbconvert indistinguishable from jupyter, in practice, when ipywidgets.interact or other any other interactive features get involved, my experience is that nbconvert is not always able to render these correctly. It would be much easier to allow the user to step in rather than the nbconvert team to handle all possible futures cases.

[dlyongemallo]

Is the above still true, or is there a better way to detect when nbconvert is running than to set an environment variable? We have a notebook which has interactive javascript, which we want to output as a static image when producing a PDF from sphinx.