Interactive code examples

for documentation, education and fun 🎉

Codapi is a platform for embedding interactive code snippets directly into your product documentation, online course or blog post.

┌───────────────────────────────┐
│ def greet(name):              │
│   print(f"Hello, {name}!")    │
│                               │
│ greet("World")                │
└───────────────────────────────┘
  Run ►  Edit  ✓ Done
┌───────────────────────────────┐
│ Hello, World!                 │
└───────────────────────────────┘

Codapi manages sandboxes (isolated execution environments) and provides an API to execute code in these sandboxes. It also provides a JavaScript widget codapi-js for easier integration.

Highlights:

• Automatically converts static code examples into mini-playgrounds.
• Lightweight and easy to integrate.
• Sandboxes for any programming language, database, or software.
• Open source. Uses the permissive Apache-2.0 license.

For an introduction to Codapi, see this post: Interactive code examples for fun and profit.

Installation

See Installing Codapi for details.

Usage (API)

Call /v1/exec to run the code in a sandbox:

POST https://api.codapi.org/v1/exec
content-type: application/json

{
    "sandbox": "python",
    "command": "run",
    "files": {
        "": "print('hello world')"
    }
}

sandbox is the name of the pre-configured sandbox, and command is the name of a command supported by that sandbox. See Adding a sandbox for details on how to add a new sandbox.

files is a map, where the key is a filename and the value is its contents. When executing a single file, it should either be named as the command expects, or be an empty string (as in the example above).

Response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "id": "python_run_9b7b1afd",
  "ok": true,
  "duration": 314,
  "stdout": "hello world\n",
  "stderr": ""
}

• id is the unique execution identifier.
• ok is true if the code executed without errors, or false otherwise.
• duration is the execution time in milliseconds.
• stdout is what the code printed to the standard output.
• stderr is what the code printed to the standard error, or a compiler/os error (if any).

Usage (JavaScript)

See codapi-js to embed the JavaScript widget into a web page. The widget uses exactly the same API as described above.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. For anything other than bugfixes, please first open an issue to discuss what you want to change.

Be sure to add or update tests as appropriate.

License

Copyright 2023 Anton Zhiyanov.

The software is available under the Apache-2.0 license.

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