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Merkury

Merkury is a command line utility to run Python scripts and render static HTML or Markdown reports with code and produced output. It uses standard .py files as input - any valid script that can be run from command line, can also be turned into a report.

It's a lightweight alternative to tools such as jupyter and papermill. While these have their advantages (and problems), when everything you need is to generate a report from a data analysis script, they might be an overkill. This project is meant to address that scenario.

Non-goals of the project:

  • interactive code execution in the browser (see jupyter),
  • generating data apps that require backend server (see e.g. dash),
  • converting any input into static HTML (see e.g. nikola).

Installation

pip3 install merkury

Usage

$ merkury -h
merkury

Usage:
    merkury [options] <script>

Options:
    -h --help                       Show this screen.
    -o <file>, --output <file>      Specify report file (if missing, <script_name>_<date>).
    -f <format>, --format <format>  Specify report format: html (default), md.
    -a <author>, --author <author>  Specify author (if missing, user name).
    -t <title>, --title <title>     Specify report title (if missing, script file name)
    -c, --toc                       Generate Table of Contents
    -v, --version                   Show version and exit.

PDF reports

It is also possible to obtain PDF reports with usage of additional conversion tools (e.g., pandoc). For example:

merkury -o /dev/stdout -f md <your_script> | pandoc --highlight-style=tango -t pdf -o report.pdf

Note, in case your report file contains raw html chunks (such as plots or images), you will need use wkhtmltopdf pdf engine.

Formatting and plots

In produced report, code will be broken into sections. Each section ends with a statement printing some output (e.g., print()). You can give titles to each section by placing magic comment #TITLE <your_section_title> after line that produces output.

Python

When it comes to report formatting, there are 3 types of outputs in a Python script: Standard <code> block (default), HTML, or Markdown.

By default merkury treats any output as standard code print and puts it into <code> blocks. If your output is actually HTML or Markdown, you need to indicate that by placing a magic comment after print statement in your script.

HTML

You need to put a comment #HTML after a line that outputs raw HTML. For example:

print(pandas_df.to_html(border=0))
#HTML

In addition to writing HTML by hand or using libraries that allow formatting output as HTML, merkury provides utility functions to format plots from common libraries. See plotting docs for details.

Markdown

It's also possible to render text formatted in markdown. You need to put magic comment #MARKDOWN after print statement.

For example:

print("""
# I'm a markdown header

List:

* l1
* l2

""")
#MARKDOWN

Acknowledgements