How to use mosaik with Jupyter notebooks

Getting mosaik and Jupyter to work together requires an extra step. This is because both mosaik and Jupyter want to create and control an asyncio.EventLoop, but these event loops cannot be nested by default.

To resolve this, there are two solutions:

You can use the library nest-asyncio. Install it and call
```
import nest_asyncio
nest_asyncio.apply()
```
at the beginning of your scenario notebook (before creating the mosaik World).
Alternatively, you can switch to using an AsyncWorld. This version of World does not control the event loop itself. In exchange, you need to call some of the mosaik methods as coroutines (i.e. using await). See async-mosaik for more on this.

There is a second problem that can occur if you also implement your own simulators: Namely, a Jupyter notebook cannot be imported using Python’s import mechanism by default. As mosaik uses the import mechanism to start simulators, writing a simulator in a notebook file does not work out of the box. To resolve this, either write your simulators in Python files, or import the import-ipynb library in your scenario (not simulator) notebook.

Jupyter example

Despite these challenges, we have an example repository demonstrating the use of mosaik in a Jupyter notebook here. You can either start it on Binder, or you can clone the repository and run the example in a local Jupyter instance.