Livebook is a tool for crafting interactive and collaborative code notebooks. It features:

• An interactive web application built with Phoenix LiveView where users can create, fork, and run multiple notebooks.

• Each notebook is made of multiple sections: each section is made of Markdown and Elixir cells. Code in Elixir cells can be evaluated on demand.

• Persistence: notebooks can be persisted to disk using the .livemd format, which is a subset of Markdown. This means your notebooks can be saved for later, easily shared, and also play well with version control.

• Sequential evaluation: code cells run in a specific order, guaranteeing future users of the same Livebook see the same output.

• Custom runtimes: when executing Elixir code, you can either start a fresh Elixir process, connect to an existing node, or run it inside an existing Elixir project, with access to all of its modules and dependencies. This means Livebook can be a great tool to provide live documentation for existing projects.

• Collaborative features allow multiple users to work on the same notebook at once. Collaboration works either in single-node or multi-node deployments - without a need for additional tooling.

Here is a peek at the "Welcome to Livebook" introductory notebook:

Note the current release provides only the initial step of our Livebook vision. Our plan is to continue focusing on visual, collaborative, and interactive features in the upcoming releases.

Usage

For now, the best way to run Livebook is by cloning it and running it locally:

$ git clone https://github.com/elixir-nx/livebook.git
$ cd livebook
$ mix deps.get --only prod
$ MIX_ENV=prod mix phx.server

You will need Elixir v1.11 or later.

We will work on other distribution modes (escripts, Docker images, etc) in future releases.

License

Copyright (C) 2021 Dashbit

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the
License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Rationale

Note: this section is not legal advice and does not give you any guarantees beyond those listed in the LICENSE file.

Dashbit has released many open source projects throughout the years under the Apache 2 License. However, for Livebook, we choose to use AGPL v3. The reason for this choice is because Livebook is an application and not a library. Other projects that use AGPL are RStudio and ScyllaDB.

Livebook's LICENSE does not impact your own notebooks. All of the notebooks you write belong to you and under the license of your choice (if any). However, if you make changes to Livebook source code, your modifications have to be available for those using your version of Livebook. For example, if you change Livebook to run it exclusively inside your own company, your changes only have to be available within the company itself. However, if you modify Livebook in order to build your own software package or your own service, then you must link back to Livebook and distribute the modified source code under the same license as Livebook.

At the end of the day, it is not different from using a database that is AGPL licensed: your data, the queries you write, and the applications that talk to the DB are all distinct and separate from the database itself. However, if you want to add new functionality to the database and charge a fee for others to use it, then you need to make your derived source code public too.

Here is further reading for those interested:

• GNU Affero General Public License
• Understanding the AGPL: The Most Misunderstood License