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Publish and share

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Sanni heruwala edited this page Jun 12, 2026 · 1 revision

Publish and share

One click → a public HTML link of the notebook. No account required to view. The shared page is a single self-contained HTML document — no JavaScript, no fonts to fetch at view time, just the markdown + SQL + result snapshot the user saw.

Publishing a notebook

  1. Open the notebook.
  2. Click the Share icon in the topbar.
  3. Click Publish current state.
  4. A share URL appears — copy it, open it in a new tab, or DM it.

Every publish mints a new token. Old links keep working until you revoke them. The dialog lists every live link with timestamps + a copy / open / revoke action per row.

What the published page contains

The renderer in rednotebook/notebook/publisher.py walks the notebook cell by cell:

  • Markdown cells → fully rendered Markdown.
  • SQL cells → syntax-highlighted code block + a snapshot of the cell's last result (table with up to 200 rows, plus the row-count + duration meta line).
  • Ask AI cells → the user's prompt + the assistant's reply Markdown.
  • Visualization cells → a compact "live chart rendering is omitted in the static page" note (charts need JS; we don't ship JS).
  • Knowledge note cells → title + body Markdown.

A footer at the bottom reads:

Made with RedNotebook AI — open-source AI data notebook.

What's NOT in the published page

  • Your live data source. The result is a snapshot — viewers see what you saw when you clicked Publish, not the result of running the query at view time.
  • Your AI provider keys. Never sent.
  • Anything from another notebook. Each publish is scoped to the notebook ID + the snapshots you supply.

URLs

URL Auth Purpose
POST /api/notebooks/{id}/publish required Mints a token
GET /api/notebooks/{id}/publish required Lists active tokens
DELETE /api/notebooks/{id}/publish/{token} required Revokes
GET /published/{token} public Renders the snapshot

The public viewer sets X-Robots-Tag: noindex so accidentally shared links don't end up in search engines.

Hosting the page elsewhere

Right now the publish URL is served from your running RedNotebook AI instance — fine for localhost and team-VPN deployments, less ideal for sharing externally. Workarounds:

  • Tunnel the instance temporarily (Cloudflare Tunnel, ngrok, Tailscale Funnel) — the share link works from anywhere.
  • Download + host yourself. The published HTML lives at local_data/published/<token>.html. Drop it on GitHub Pages, S3, or any static host — it has zero runtime dependencies.

A "publish to GitHub Pages" button is a candidate follow-up — open an issue if you want it.

Revoking

Click the trash icon next to any link in the Publish dialog. The underlying HTML file is deleted and the manifest entry removed; the URL returns 404 on next view. Other share links for the same notebook stay live.

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