It would be super nice to be alerted to failing notebooks – I’ve seen several failed notebooks from others that just had a failing library import/require and just today I had one working fine on my machine because I had cached an earlier version of react-dom in my browser (and the thumbnail showed fine in Observable as a confirmation) but something broke and I was only alerted when @RandomFractals took the time to let me know.
1 Like
agreed! been there, done that too
@tom is this something that can be detected in the thumbnails gen loop you run on notebook updates?
I think it would need to be run periodically because in many cases, dependency breaks could happen well after the last update/publish. It would be really nice if it could suggest fixes for require issues and even “fix” the issue quietly if applicable.
1 Like
yeah, I think thumbnails gen loop runs that way.
idk… just guessing, but a good call on this feature request. I’ve seen my notebooks and others fail that way too
We’re putting most of our effort in this regard toward making notebooks stable in the first place - bundle.run and unpkg, though they’re lovely projects made by great people, are often down or failing to build all projects at all times. Despite the epic amount of traffic that unpkg does, there might be some benefit to us hosting our own, or adding more resources to bundle.run. Once we’ve figured out how to get rid of the avoidable breakages, then maybe something like monitoring notebooks for failures will be up next.
2 Likes
yeah, unpkg is huge but even they break.
would be nice if you could run their clone just for this sys notebooks.
also, this q./feature request wasn’t related to those imports breaks.
anyway, can you at least notify or email notebook authors when thumbnail gen. fails to start with?
and do we have a better solution than https://cors-anywhere.herokuapp.com/https://api.observablehq.com for your api calls for stats?
can you introduce userKey for us to ping your sys without jumping through those cors forks while at it?
related: