History of the Jupyter Book project
A brief history of the Jupyter Book project, and the journey it took along the way.
A first attempt using Jekyll¶
The Jupyter Book project was started with the first commit in June of 2018. Initially, work was focussed on building a series of scripts to compile Jupyter Notebooks into a textbook using Jekyll.
Creation of the jupyter book application¶
In 2020, the “new” Jupyter Book (0.7) was announced which re-built Jupyter Book from the ground up to make it
easier to install, faster to use, and able to create more complex publishing content in your books.
Executable Books
This work was supported by the Executable Books project, an open community building open-source tools powered by a grant from the Sloan foundation.
The 0.7 re-write established the Jupyter Book application on top the Sphinx documentation engine, which was at the time used primarily for documentation of Python projects. With this move to Sphinx, a new Markdown dialect MyST Markdown (Markedly Structured Text Markdown) was created to combine the expressiveness of Sphinx’s Restructured Text with the familiarity and readability of Markdown.
In addition to using a new documentation engine, Jupyter Book 0.7 saw the introduction of Thebe which brought interactivity and widgets to published books using the power of Binder.
In 2023, a broad effort to recognize the stability of the Jupyter Book software stack was made through a series of 1.0 releases. This saw updates to core Jupyter Book packages such as myst-nb and sphinx-book-theme to support Sphinx 7 and Python 3.11+, and marked the “maintenance phase” of the Jupyter Book tools.
Jupyter Book is rebuilt on top of MyST-MD¶
As outlined above, Jupyter Book has a long history. Over its lifetime, it has become a well-established tool for authoring and publishing in the Jupyter ecosystem with over 13,000 GitHub repositories now using the tool. During that time, the Executable Books team have learned a great deal about the ways in which our communities use Jupyter Book, witnessed first-hand the pain-points in building a book publishing tool on top of Sphinx, and explored new ways in which the Jupyter Book tools can be used. Following these learnings, and the success of the MyST-MD project that was launched in 2022, it became clear that the future of Jupyter Book lay in a new direction.
Jupyter Book 2 is built on top of the MyST-MD engine, which uses the latest web frameworks and JavaScript libraries to produce beautiful documents and websites that provide rich reading experiences on top of powerful structured representations.