[SOLVED] Jupyter notebook shell command/line magic failure does not cause cell failure

Jupyter notebook shell command/line magic failure does not cause cell failure

I'm using a Jupyter notebook as a tutorial for a command-line tool. However, I noticed that regardless of whether I use a shell command (!) or line magic (%), an error does not cause the cell to fail, and the execution simply continues. For example:

!pip install foo
%pip install foo

Is there any way to cause these errors to be fatal instead of continuing on to the next cell to execute?

Solution

You want the code in the 'install cell' to be:

%pip install foo
import foo

Then it won't continue on after failing to install.

Technically, this more general solution also allows what you want when using an ipykernel:

%%bash
pip install foo

(For Windows users, you may want to try %%cmd instead of %%bash.)

That should generalize to more command line executions that fail.

However, because of reasons I put in my comments to the original post, this would be bad to teach learners to use pip this way.