Mkreports package

Introduction

The mkreports package makes it easy for you to write complex reports in mkdocs including tables, graphics and programmatically defined output using only python scripts. No Jupyter notebooks or workarounds such as jupytext are needed.

This methods works seamlessly with complex codebases, encourages modularity and re-useability of code.

Below is an example of a simple page. However, the documentation for this package is also created with mkreports. The code can be found in the documentation.

Quickstart

It is very easy to create new reports and pages. Below an example that creates a report in the example_report directory and creates one page quickstart in which a table and a plot of some data is shown together with the code used to create those items.

import pandas as pd
import plotnine as p9
from mkreports import Report
from plotnine.data import mtcars

report = Report.create("example_report", report_name="Mkreports documentations")

p = report.page("quickstart")

p.H1("Quickstart")

p.P(
    """
    First, below the code that was used to create this page.
    It is a very brief example of an page with a table and an image
    as well as some text, like here.
    """
)

p.CodeFile(__file__)

p.P(
    """
    We are quickly analyzing the mtcars dataset
    that is included with plotnine.
    """
)

with p.H2("Data as a table"):

    p.Tabulator(mtcars, add_header_filters=True, prettify_colnames=True)

with p.H2("Some simple plots"):

    p.Image(
        (
            p9.ggplot(mtcars, p9.aes("wt", "mpg", color="factor(gear)"))
            + p9.geom_point()
            + p9.stat_smooth(method="lm")
            + p9.facet_wrap("~gear")
        )
    )

Now change to the folder example_report and run

mkdocs serve

and go to that page. The report will be shown in the browser. As the development server of mkdocs supports automatic reload, as you run code, it will update automatically. This is particularly convenient when running the IPython extension for interactive analyses.

Why write this package?

First of all, because developing it is fun to do. It is a very nice challenge to provide a user friendly interface that provides a lot of flexibility.

Another reason was to provide a highly modular and flexible way to create reports in markdown that can contain fragments obtained in computation. The main tool in this space is Jupyter Notebooks at the moment, but hopefully this tool can provide an alternative in certain settings.

Packages used here

• mkdocs: A package to create static websites from markdown documents that provides many features and is the bases for this package.
• mkdocs-material: The material theme for mkdocs that implements some features that we are using.
• mdutils: A package that gives already many options to write out markdown from python and that this package uses internally.