Reproducible Jupyter Notebook with Nix

So you have a Jupyter Notebook with pyproject.toml and poetry.lock files, and you want to productionise it? You’ll just need a Linux or macOS machine. This is the magic sauce:

{
  pkgs ?
    import
    (
      fetchTarball {
        name = "22.05";
        url = "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/ce6aa13369b667ac2542593170993504932eb836.tar.gz";
        sha256 = "0d643wp3l77hv2pmg2fi7vyxn4rwy0iyr8djcw1h5x72315ck9ik";
      }
    )
    {},
}: let
  poetryEnvironment = pkgs.poetry2nix.mkPoetryEnv {
    projectDir = builtins.path {
      path = ./.;
      name = "my_project_name";
    };
  };
in
  poetryEnvironment.env.overrideAttrs (
    oldAttrs: {
      buildInputs = [
        pkgs.cacert
      ];
    }
  )

The top half of that pins the most recent nixpkgs release, to make sure we always build from the same sources. mkPoetryEnv creates a Nix derivation based on your poetry.lock file. And the certificate authority certs package is needed to download Python packages using HTTPS.

And this is the magic spoon: nix-shell --pure --run 'jupyter nbconvert --debug --execute --inplace --to=notebook my.ipynb'. It runs the notebook from start to finish within the Nix shell defined above. It is verbose, to make it easier to detect any issues, so you might want to remove --debug.

Based on a real-life project which includes automated tests for both Nix and Poetry-based workflows.