Accessing Jupyter API in Third-Party Extensions

[daniyal305]

Hello Jupyter Extension Team,

I’m developing a VS Code extension that integrates with the Jupyter extension to fetch and list available Jupyter kernels. However, when calling the Jupyter API, I received the following message:

"Thank you for trying the Jupyter API. Please file an issue on our repo to allow the extension unknown to use this API in production. This would prevent us from breaking your extension when updating the API (as it is still a work in progress)."

Since the Jupyter API is currently restricted for unknown extensions in production, I’d like to open a discussion on:

1. What is the recommended approach for third-party extensions to access Jupyter kernel information?
2. Is there an official process for registering an extension to gain API access?
3. Are there any alternative ways to retrieve kernel information without relying on the Jupyter extension’s internal API?

What I Tried:

I attempted to fetch available kernels using the following approach:

const jupyterExt = vscode.extensions.getExtension("ms-toolsai.jupyter");
if (jupyterExt && !jupyterExt.isActive) {
    await jupyterExt.activate();
}
const api = jupyterExt?.exports;
const kernelService = await api?.getKernelService();

However, this resulted in the warning message above.

Questions for the Team:

• What is the recommended way to integrate with Jupyter’s API in an external extension?

I’d love to hear thoughts from the team and the community on how best to proceed. Thanks for your time and all the work you do on the Jupyter extension! 🚀