ipywidgets

ipywidgets are visual elements that allow users to specify parameter values in notebook cells. You can use ipywidgets to make your Databricks Python notebooks interactive.

The ipywidgets package includes over 30 different controls, including form controls such as sliders, text boxes, and checkboxes, as well as layout controls such as tabs, accordions, and grids. Using these elements, you can build graphical user interfaces to interface with your notebook code.

Requirements

• ipywidgets are available in preview in Databricks Runtime 11.0 through Databricks Runtime 12.2 LTS, and are generally available in Databricks Runtime 13.0 and above. Support for Unity Catalog tables is available in Databricks Runtime 12.2 LTS and above on Unity Catalog-enabled clusters.
• To use ipywidgets on Databricks, your browser must be able to access the databricks-dev-cloudfront.dev.databricks.com domain.

By default, ipywidgets occupies port 6062. With Databricks Runtime 11.3 LTS and above, if you run into conflicts with third-party integrations such as Datadog, you can change the port using the following Spark config:

spark.databricks.driver.ipykernel.commChannelPort <port-number>

For example:

spark.databricks.driver.ipykernel.commChannelPort 1234

The Spark config must be set when the cluster is created.

Usage

The following code creates a histogram with a slider that can take on values between 3 and 10. The value of the widget determines the number of bins in the histogram. As you move the slider, the histogram updates immediately. See the ipywidgets example notebook to try this out.

import ipywidgets as widgets
from ipywidgets import interact

# Load a dataset
sparkDF = spark.read.csv("/databricks-datasets/bikeSharing/data-001/day.csv", header="true", inferSchema="true")

# In this code, `(bins=(3, 10)` defines an integer slider widget that allows values between 3 and 10.
@interact(bins=(3, 10))
def plot_histogram(bins):
  pdf = sparkDF.toPandas()
  pdf.hist(column='temp', bins=bins)

The following code creates an integer slider that can take on values between 0 and 10. The default value is 5. To access the value of the slider in your code, use int_slider.value.

import ipywidgets as widgets

int_slider = widgets.IntSlider(max=10, value=5)
int_slider

The following code loads and displays a sample dataframe from a table in Unity Catalog. Support for Unity Catalog tables is available with Databricks Runtime 12.1 and above on Unity Catalog-enabled clusters.

import ipywidgets as widgets

# Create button widget. Clicking this button loads a sampled dataframe from UC table.
button = widgets.Button(description="Load dataframe sample")

# Output widget to display the loaded dataframe
output = widgets.Output()

def load_sample_df(table_name):
  return spark.sql(f"SELECT * FROM {table_name} LIMIT 1000")

def on_button_clicked(_):
    with output:
      output.clear_output()
      df = load_sample_df('<catalog>.<schema>.<table>')
      print(df.toPandas())

# Register the button's callback function to query UC and display results to the output widget
button.on_click(on_button_clicked)

display(button, output)

Notebook example: ipywidgets

The following notebook shows some examples of using ipywidgets in notebooks.

ipywidgets example notebook

Get notebook

Notebook example: ipywidgets advanced example

The following notebook shows a more complex example using ipywidgets to create an interactive map.

Advanced example: maps with ipywidgets

Get notebook

Best practices for using ipywidgets and Databricks widgets

To add interactive controls to Python notebooks, Databricks recommends using ipywidgets. For notebooks in other languages, use Databricks widgets.

You can use Databricks widgets to pass parameters between notebooks and to pass parameters to jobs; ipywidgets do not support these scenarios.

Which third-party Jupyter widgets are supported in Databricks?

Databricks provides best-effort support for third-party widgets, such as ipyleaflet, bqplot, and VegaFusion. However, some third-party widgets are not supported. For a list of the widgets that have been tested in Azure Databricks notebooks, contact your Azure Databricks account team.

Limitations

See Known limitations Databricks notebooks](notebook-limitations.md) for more information.