Run Bokeh server on Azure Databricks?

Question

I locally use Bokeh server to visualize data. I tried doing this in Azure's version of Databricks as well, but couldn't get even the first lines of this simple example to run:

from bokeh.io import push_notebook, show, output_notebook
from bokeh.plotting import figure
output_notebook() # <- fails

This fails with the following error:

TypeError: publish_display_data() missing 1 required positional argument: 'data'

I investigated further and found out that databricks is apparently built open IPython 2.2.0, which is over 4 years old!

import IPython
IPython.__version__ # Returns '2.2.0'

Is there anything I can do? Did anyone have success with running a bokeh server in Databricks? I want to have some kind of interactive Dashboard, and Databricks' own dashboard is extremely limited

Answer 1

As you note, IPython 2.2.0 is ancient. I'm not sure how far back you'd have to go in Bokeh releases to find one that supports it. The function publish_display_data is a Juypter/IPython API, and unfortunately it has seen a few breaking changes over the years. The Bokeh project used to maintain a compatibility polyfill for it to try to smooth over these changes, and support older versions, but it was removed in this commit last year:

https://github.com/bokeh/bokeh/commit/fb3f9cc4f9e9af786698462a9849e46c0ea34cf2

After that commit, 4.3 is the minimum notebook version for any use. Before that commit, some set of earlier Jupyter releases will work, but I can't say exactly how much earlier, and I can't guarantee that an emebedded Bokeh server apps would work (ie very possibly only inline standalone plots would work) Embedded Bokeh server apps have never been tested on anything earlier than Jupyter 4.3 and I would never make a claim that Bokeh supports embedded apps in notebook versions older than that.

TLDR; I highly doubt things are workable on IPython 2.2.0