Last week I wrote a post on killing OTP processes, which was also a LiveBook page. The process for embedding LiveBook in a Jekyll blog was straightforward, if not entirely satisfactory. If you’re curious, or want to try it, here’s my current setup for this:

Directory for LiveBook pages

The standard Jekyll setup has a directory _posts for your blog posts. (The engine processes the contents of the directory to populate the _site_ directory with your posts.). I created a livebook directory under posts to house my LiveBook pages1.

Publishing the LiveBook page as a blog post.

Once I’ve got my LiveBook page in _posts_/livebook, I still need to get it into the blog. A Jekyyll post needs some headers (not LiveBook friendly) and the content. To get the page embedded, I created new blog post and used the include_relative tag to embed the page. The entire previous blog post (source here) is thus

---
layout: post
title: The many and varied ways to kill an OTP Process
date: 2021-05-31 11:02:22 +0100
author: Paul Wilson
categories: elixir otp
---

{% include_relative livebook/varied-ways-to-kill.livemd %}

Dealing with the double header

Jekyll adds the post title as a h1 header. LiveBook also creates a h1 header for the page title, so now there’s got two titles. I guess I could fix this by post-processing the LiveBook page, or doing fancy stuff with Jekyll but as no other posts should have h1 in content I just hid it in the (s)css (source).

.post-content {
  h1 {
    display: none;
  }
}

Admittedly, it’s a bit of a hack and probably mildly dubious from an accessibility point of view

Pointing the Livebook server to the right place

LiveBook servers can be kicked off from any directory and browser to pick up or save pages to any other directory. For convenience, though, I created a shell script in this blog’s bin directory for launching a server pointing in roughly the right direction.

#!/usr/bin/env sh

set -e

ROOT_PATH=`dirname $0`/../_posts/livebook

livebook server --root-path=$ROOT_PATH

Satisfaction

The LiveBook embedded post looks ok, and fits with the rest of the posts in this blog. (Obviously it all could look a lot better than the basic theme, but that kind of thing is beyond my capabilities).

Of course, the blog post is not directly executable, though someone could download it from here and execute it locally.

It would be a lot better if the output of executing all the code in the page could be somehow captured and published, though I can think of all kinds of ways that this would not be straightforward. I may take a look sometime, though.

  1. cough I guess LiveBook page at the time of writing; there’s only one. ↩