ipython/ipynb

Reload semantics

mikepurvis opened this issue · 3 comments

I'm in JupyterLab, with two notebooks open, one of which is importing a function from the other (tools.ipynb):

import ipynb.fs.defs.tools

However, it doesn't seem to pick up changes from the other one, even when I re-run the cell containing the import. However, if I:

import importlib
importlib.reload(ipynb.fs.defs.tools)

Then it does indeed pick it up changes each time. Unfortunately, this doesn't work for the from X import Y style, since the reference to the module containing the imported item isn't in scope to pass to reload.

Is it possible that ipynb could watch timestamps on the imported files and handle this under the hood when the imported file changes? Thanks for a great project!

Thanks for opening the issue and the nice comments.
We don't have a lot of bandwidth to work on this project so it has not moved forward a lot.

One of the limitation here is the one of Python's import, and I am not familiar enough with the internal to know whether what you ask is possible.

In JupyterLab you should be able to attach the same kernel to both notebook, which might help mitigate the issue.

I got the same error when trying to change and save the file where my helper functions were defined within Jupyter Notebooks.

Rerunning the below line in a jupyter cell would not reload the newly saved functions.

import ipynb.fs.defs.Helper_Functions as helper

@mikepurvis solution worked for me. I ran:

import importlib
importlib.reload(helper)

eload(helper

/opt/anaconda3/envs/ml/lib/python3.7/importlib/init.py in reload(module)
138 """
139 if not module or not isinstance(module, types.ModuleType):
--> 140 raise TypeError("reload() argument must be a module")
141 try:
142 name = module.spec.name

TypeError: reload() argument must be a module

I got this error when I try to reload one function under my helper_fun.ipynb file when I ran

from ipynb.fs.defs.helper_fun import add_num
from importlib import reload
reload(add_num)