Debugging Jupyter notebooks, consoles and source files

For certain tasks, Jupyter users tend to switch to general-purpose IDEs. Therefore, the Jupyter project has decided to add a new feature that Jupyter users have been missing—a visual debugger in JupyterLab. Let’s take a closer look at the features of the debugging extension’s initial release.

The open source Project Jupyter has announced the initial release, v0.2.0, of its visual debugger extension on the Jupyter Medium blog.

The new debugging extension can be used in Jupyter notebooks, consoles and source files within JupyterLab, which is “a web-based interactive development environment for Jupyter notebooks, code, and data.”

Features

The JupyterLab debugger UI extension provides a sidebar with a variable explorer, source preview, a list of breakpoints and the option to navigate the call stack. The extension also allows users to set breakpoints directly next to the code and indicates where the current execution has stopped by using visual markers.

Future plans include the ability to debug Voilà dashboards from the JupyterLab Voilà preview extension and support for conditional breakpoints in the UI.

The requirements for using the new debugger are JupyterLab 2.0+, Jupyter Notebook 6+ and xeus-python 0.6.7+. It should work with any kernel that supports debugging.

SEE ALSO: Python extension for VS Code receives its March 2020 update

See the blog post and the GitHub repository for more details.