Ingredients and Plutos package manager

[karlwessel]

Currently, when I have an ingredient that imports a package, then I have to import that package also manually in each notebook that uses that ingredient. Would it be possible for Pluto to automatically add those packages to the environment of the notebook that includes the ingredient?

Even better for reproducibility would be of course if both keep their own environment, but that probably isn't possible.

[Pangoraw]

I am not sure I understand what you mean by package here. Are you using @ingredients on:

• Another Pluto notebook with its own environment
• A plain Julia file
• The entry point of a package (Package.jl/src/Package.jl)

[karlwessel]

The first one, another Pluto notebook with its own environment

[karlwessel]

So I have a notebook that has some cell using SomePackage. When I want to use that notebook as an ingredient in another notebook I manually have to also add a Cell containing using SomePackage.

[fonsp]

This is a really good question @karlwessel ! And a larger project that we still need to figure out.

Ideally, the other notebook's env will be added as a Pkg dependency to the main notebook. That way, the dependencies of the other notebook will be made available, respecting constraints in the embedded Project.toml of the other notebook (which Pluto automatically writes).

The basic idea is to create a temporary folder containing the Project.toml (with some additions) and Manifest.toml from the notebook and a file src/SomeName.jl containing something like module SomeName $(notebook code) end. Then in the main notebook, this folder would be added as dependency using Pkg.develop.

But this leads to a reproducibility problem: we want someone else to be able to open the notebook. So far, our reproducibility has always focused on a single file, but in this case, you also need the other notebook file, and the temporary package files need to be generated before instantiating the notebook's environment. Maybe the other notebook's contents should be embedded in the file of the main notebook? Tricky tricky

Then some other aspects that come into play:

• Recursive imports
• Importing a notebook file from a URL, instead of a local file
• Can we also get notebook-as-function features from What you see is what you REST fonsp/Pluto.jl#1052 ?

cc @pankgeorg @dralletje