Ignoring Errors

Normally, if an exception is raised while executing a notebook, the Sphinx build process is stopped immediately.

If a notebook contains errors on purpose (or if you are too lazy to fix them right now), you have three options:

  1. Manually execute the notebook in question and save the results, see the pre-executed example notebook.
  2. Allow errors in all notebooks by setting this option in conf.py:
nbsphinx_allow_errors = True
  1. Allow errors on a per-notebook basis by adding this to the notebook’s JSON metadata:
"nbsphinx": {
  "allow_errors": true
},

This very notebook is an example for the last option. The results of the following code cells are not stored within the notebook, therefore it is executed during the Sphinx build process. Since the above-mentioned allow_errors flag is set in this notebook’s metadata, all cells are executed although most of them cause an exception.

In [1]:
nonsense
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
NameError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-1-7dd4c0df649c> in <module>()
----> 1 nonsense

NameError: name 'nonsense' is not defined
In [2]:
42 / 0
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ZeroDivisionError                         Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-2-52cebea8b64f> in <module>()
----> 1 42 / 0

ZeroDivisionError: division by zero
In [3]:
print 'Hello, world!'
  File "<ipython-input-3-653b30cd70a8>", line 1
    print 'Hello, world!'
                        ^
SyntaxError: Missing parentheses in call to 'print'

In [4]:
6 ~ 7
  File "<ipython-input-4-8300b2622db3>", line 1
    6 ~ 7
      ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

In [5]:
6 * 7
Out[5]:
42