Advanced extension configuration#

Warning

This is a more advanced section on extension configuration. We recommend following the simple extensions guide first.

Ignore extensions from the environment#

By default JupyterLite uses a discovery mechanism to include extensions installed in a local environment.

This discovery behavior can be disabled with the CLI flag --ignore-sys-prefix or LiteBuildConfig/ignore_sys_prefix.

The --ignore-sys-prefix CLI flag will disable using components from the JupyterLab environment for all addons. This behavior can be configured in a more granular way on a per-addon basis, for example:

{
  "LiteBuildConfig": {
    "ignore_sys_prefix": ["federated_extensions"]
  }
}

This is for example useful if you don’t want “side-effects” in case you are building a site from an environment with already installed extensions.

Disabling Extensions at Runtime#

All third-party extensions, and some provided by JupyterLite and JupyterLab, can be disabled for one or all apps deployed in a site with the disabledExtensions option.

For example, a site that doesn’t need the content to be available from the Python kernel can disable the ServiceWorker plugin with the following jupyter-lite.json:

{
  "jupyter-lite-schema-version": 0,
  "jupyter-config-data": {
    "disabledExtensions": ["@jupyterlite/server-extension:service-worker"]
  }
}

Extensions for a Specific App#

Similar to the above, by updating $YOUR_JUPYTERLITE/{app}/jupyter-lite.json, the pre-built extensions will only be available for pages within that file tree.

Adding Custom Extensions#

By placing extensions under {lite-dir}/extensions/{org/?}{package}/, these will also be copied into the output-dir after any environment extensions, and all will be added to {output-dir}/jupyter-lite.json#jupyter-config-data/federated_extensions.

Hint

For example, after building a lab extension, you can copy the contents of packages.json#/jupyterlab/outputDir right into the lite-dir to preview your extension.

Finally, the --federated-extensions CLI flag and the LiteBuildConfig/federated_extensions config entry allow for adding additional federated extensions, as packaged on:

  • PyPI:

    • .whl

  • conda-forge:

    • .tar.bz2

    • .conda (see warning below)

Using libarchive#

If detected, libarchive-c will be used for better performance, especially when working with archives with many/large assets, espcially pyodide.

If libarchive-c is not detected, Python’s built-in zipfile and tarfile modules will be used.

Warning

Extracting federated extensions from .conda packages requires libarchive-c.