Interface Preview in Saved Notebooks

[merveenoyan]

When I save a colab notebook or any notebook that has Gradio UI, below shows up instead of a preview of a UI. That would be nice to save a preview of UI even if it doesn't run.

Also in kaggle I get below.

It's probably not high priority but a veeeery nice to have 🙂
cc @osanseviero since we discussed it.

[omerXfaruq]

Thx for the suggestion! Hmm, it would be not that critical but nice to have I presume. Can't think of a way on doing that immediately, do you guys have any idea on how to do it? @merveenoyan, @osanseviero, @abidlabs?

[merveenoyan]

I think it's good, given even if we want it to be adopted on Kaggle someone who comes across this for the first time will not be able to understand what it's used for (nor for Colab, so it causes loss in getting people on board sort of)
As for implementation I can't think of it, but even sort of a screenshot and when you bring your cursor over it a text saying "run the notebook to interact with UI" would be good. (or text over screenshot would suffice)

[abidlabs]

Interesting, it might be possible by taking a screenshot via javascript when the interface is launched and using that as the fallback if the share URL cannot be found or no longer corresponds to the running Gradio app.

I actually think this is a good idea because I've heard from some users that we're starting to have collisions in the share URL, meaning that user A launches an Interface with the URL xxxxx.gradio.app, closes the notebook, then user B launches an Interface that also happens to have the same URL xxxxx.gradio. When user A opens their notebook again, it will show user B's interface embedded in their notebook.

Will add this to the roadmap

[radames]

curious @abidlabs, would be possible to run Gradio Interface inside the notebooks without the proxy?

[abidlabs]

Ah so without the ssh tunnel / public URL? We haven't been able to figure out how to expose the local host inside notebook environments without using the ssh tunnel / public URL. I'm pretty sure its impossible, but would love to be proven wrong if you have any ideas @radames

[omerXfaruq]

@abidlabs do you know why sharing is default in colab notebooks? Because it is more handy?

[abidlabs]

The reason I mentioned above -- basically, the Interface runs locally on colab machine's port 7860, but that port is not exposed to users. We haven't been able to figure out how to expose the local host inside notebook environments without using the ssh tunnel / public URL / share=True.

[omerXfaruq]

What I actually meant was, we could have share off in Colab by default as well, like in local case.

[abidlabs]

Ah that was the default behavior initially, but then people would click on the localhost link expecting to see the Interface, and it was not visible. That's why we made it share=True on colab. We should probably make it so that people can turn share=False in colab if they want (currently it forces share=True), we have an upcoming contribution that will do this: #1371

[merveenoyan]

In Kaggle it currently looks like this for 72 hours thanks to sharing:
(I haven't checked how it'll look after 72 hours so correct me if I'm wrong 😅)
I was wondering if we could put a preview of the interface after 72 hours, would this work? @freddyaboulton @abidlabs