Jupyter notebooks
You can use the Modal client library in notebook environments like Jupyter! Just import it and use as normal. However, there are some limitations to this.
Known issues
Modal functions must be defined and executed within a single notebook cell.
Currently you cannot spread your Modal functions and
stub.run()
app execution across multiple cells. Code from other cells can be referred to, but all@stub.function()
decorations should be in a single cell.Modal functions can only be called remotely.
Invoking the wrapped function locally does not work.
@stub.function() def f(): return "hello" with stub.run(): assert "hello" == f.remote() # remote call works ✔️ f() # raises error in notebook ⚠️
Interactive shell and interactive functions are not supported.
These can only be run within a live terminal session, so they are not supported in notebooks.
If you encounter issues not documented above, first check your Modal client
version is >=0.49.2142
. Also, try restarting the notebook kernel, as it may be
in a broken state, which is common in notebook development.
If the issue persists, contact us in Slack.
We are working on removing these limitations so that writing Modal applications in a notebook feels just like developing in regular Python modules and scripts.
Jupyter inside Modal
You can also run Jupyter from inside a Modal function. This gives you a serverless Jupyter environment with flexible CPU, GPU, and memory resources. It’s an interactive development session that can be allocated only when you need it.
Jupyter listens on a port in your container. We don’t have a built-in way to expose these ports to the public Internet yet.