Installation

Users can install the current version of ipywidgets with pip or conda.

In most cases, installing the Python ipywidgets package will also automatically configure classic Jupyter Notebook and JupyterLab 3.x to display ipywidgets. With pip, do:

pip install ipywidgets

or with conda, do:

conda install -c conda-forge ipywidgets

Installing in JupyterLab 3.x

Most of the time, installing ipywidgets automatically configures JupyterLab 3.x to use widgets. The ipywidgets package does this by depending on the jupyterlab_widgets package, which configures JupyterLab 3 to display and use widgets.

If JupyterLab and the IPython kernel are installed in different environments (for example, separate environments are providing different Python kernels), then the installation requires two steps:

  1. Install the jupyterlab_widgets package in the environment containing JupyterLab.

  2. Install ipywidgets in each kernel’s environment that will use ipywidgets.

For example, if using conda environments, with JupyterLab installed on the base environment and the kernel installed in an environment called pyenv, the commands are:

conda install -n base -c conda-forge jupyterlab_widgets
conda install -n pyenv -c conda-forge ipywidgets

Installing in classic Jupyter Notebook

Most of the time, installing ipywidgets automatically configures Jupyter Notebook to use widgets. The ipywidgets package does this by depending on the widgetsnbextension package, which configures the classic Jupyter Notebook to display and use widgets.

If your Jupyter Notebook and the IPython kernel are installed in different environments (for example, separate environments are providing different Python kernels), then the installation requires two steps:

  1. Install the widgetsnbextension package in the environment containing the Jupyter Notebook server.

  2. Install ipywidgets in each kernel’s environment that will use ipywidgets.

For example, if using conda environments, with Jupyter Notebook installed on the base environment and the kernel installed in an environment called pyenv, the commands are:

conda install -n base -c conda-forge widgetsnbextension
conda install -n pyenv -c conda-forge ipywidgets

Installing into JupyterLab 1 or 2

To install the JupyterLab extension into JupyterLab 1 or 2, you also need to run the command below in a terminal which requires that you have nodejs installed.

For example, if using conda environments, you can install nodejs with:

conda install -c conda-forge nodejs

Then you can install the labextension:

jupyter labextension install @jupyter-widgets/jupyterlab-manager

This command defaults to installing the latest version of the ipywidgets JupyterLab extension. Depending on the version of JupyterLab you have installed, you may need to install an older version.

If you install this extension while JupyterLab is running, you will need to refresh the page or restart JupyterLab before the changes take effect.

Note: A clean reinstall of the JupyterLab extension can be done by first running the jupyter lab clean command which will remove the staging and static directories from the lab directory. The location of the lab directory can be queried by executing the command jupyter lab path in your terminal.

Installing into classic Jupyter Notebook 5.2 or earlier

If you have an old version of Jupyter Notebook installed (version 5.2 or earlier), you may need to manually enable the ipywidgets notebook extension with:

jupyter nbextension enable --py widgetsnbextension

When using virtualenv and working in an activated virtual environment, the --sys-prefix option may be required to enable the extension and keep the environment isolated (i.e. jupyter nbextension enable --py widgetsnbextension --sys-prefix).

Frequently Asked Questions

The issues in the Reference milestone on GitHub include many questions, discussions, and answers about ipywidgets.

Question: When I display a widget or interact, I just see some text, such as IntSlider(value=0) or interactive(children=(IntSlider(value=0, description='x', max=1), Output()), _dom_classes=('widget-interact',)). What is wrong?

Answer: A text representation of the widget is printed if the widget control is not available. It may mean the widget JavaScript is still loading. If the message persists in the Jupyter Notebook or JupyterLab, it likely means that the widgets JavaScript library is either not installed or not enabled. See the installation instructions above for setup instructions.

If you see this message in another frontend (for example, a static rendering on GitHub or NBViewer), it may mean that your frontend doesn’t currently support widgets.