Interact.jl allows you to use interactive widgets such as sliders, dropdowns and checkboxes to play with your Julia code.

To install Interact, run the following command in the Julia REPL:

Pkg.add("Interact")

Note: Interact only works with IPython/Jupyter version 3.0 or higher.

To start using it in an IJulia notebook, include it:

using Interact

GtkInteract provides Gtk support for Interact, letting you use tools like Winston for plotting.

The best way to learn to use the interactive widgets is to try out the example notebooks in the doc/notebooks/ directory. Start up IJulia from doc/notebooks/:

using IJulia
notebook()

Interact needs IJulia to be running on Jupyter/IPython 3.x or Jupyter 4.x. For Jupyter 4.x, the Python packages jupyter and ipywidgets must be installed.

Interact relies on the ipywidgets python package which is an add-on to Jupyter that provides the widgets. The 5.x version of ipywidgets is installed by default by IJulia as of now. It might be the case that you have version 4.x of ipywidgets in which case you will need to use the ipywidgets-4 branch of Interact due to backwards-incompatible changes. To do this, simply run Pkg.checkout("Interact", "ipywidgets-4"). You can run

import ipywidgets
ipywidgets.__version__

in the python shell used by Jupyter to find out which version of ipywidgets you have. (Pkg.build("Interact") should also tell you which version of ipywidgets you have)