Cauldron is designed to make it easy to run a notebook in a production environment from within Python or directly from a command line.

Production execution would look like this when called within Python:

This will open, run and then close the specified project. The HTML will be exported to the output directory if one is provided. The data normally printed to the console will be saved to the specified logging_path file.

Production execution from within Python can be used to turn Cauldron notebooks into Luigi tasks or other data pipeline tools that are Python compatible. It can be very beneficial to create multiple Cauldron notebooks as pieces of a data pipeline and then use a Luigi-like tool to run them and manage ordering of dependencies.

The exact same command shown above can also be run from the command line using the cauldron command and supplying the necessary arguments:

This does exactly the same thing as the python script shown above, but can be called directly from a terminal or added to a shell script.

The Cauldron Python library is pure Python, and has no complicated external dependencies. It can be bundled and distributed to cluster nodes with other Python code without requiring root installation support.