Can you run blackbricks while using databricks in the browser?

[msmall318]

For those without a CLI setup, could you run this in the browser version of databricks?
My thought would be blackbricks.format_notebook('notebook_path', ['notebook_dest']) with ['notebook_dest'] being an optional argument with the default being notebook_path to just update the current notebook.

[msmall318]

Found in the documentation that request is not currently possible

[bsamseth]

Hi! There are two ways this could have worked, but none of which work as you would hope:

• The databricks CLI is preinstalled on recent Databricks runtimes, but they do not automatically set up credentials for you. If you do configure the databricks CLI on a cluster, you could run blackbricks just as normal.
  • I have an open feature request to Databricks about them automatically providing credentials for databricks CLI. Give it a thumbs up if you'd like Databricks to consider it (I don't have very high expectations, but who knows).
  • Default credentials when running on a cluster databricks/databricks-cli#560
• The notebook file does live on the filesystem that you can get at with a %sh cell. This would have been a solution, where you could just run blackbricks on the cluster-filesystem file. Sadly, it doesn't work because for some reason you can't access the contents of notebooks via the filesystem. See this example.
  

So, the conclusion is that no, right now you cannot do what you want, and there doesn't seem to be a way for blackbricks to work around it either. You need to either sync the notebook as a local file and run blackbricks on that before you reupload it, or you'll need to set up databricks CLI and run blackbricks on the remotely stored notebooks.

[tedjt]

We just added support embedded in the notebook web ui for formatting python cells with Black when using DBR 11.2
https://docs.databricks.com/notebooks/notebooks-use.html#format-code-cells on

Blackbricks is still better for formatting integrated with CI and for bulk formatting many files, but for quick cell level formatting during development, hopefully the new feature works for people.

[msmall318]

Thanks for the info. I'll check it out.