Trick for using --show on Windows

Panel
1

Hi

I just wanted to share a little trick for using efficiently using the --show argument with bokeh serve on windows.

My pain is that my default browser is edge and cannot be changed for reasons outside of my control. I could see that I could set the default browser for Bokeh/ Panel using the BOKEH_BROWSER environment variable. But when I tried setting it to chrome or firefox it did not work. After some reverse engineering of the webbrowser module I found out I need to set


BOKEH_BROWSER="C:/Program\ Files/Google/Chrome/Application/chrome.exe %s &"



BOKEH_BROWSER="C:/Program\ Files\ (x86)/Mozilla\ Firefox/firefox.exe %s &"

or something similar.

It’s important you replace

  • “\” with “/” and

  • space with "\ "

so now I can run

python -m panel serve app.py --dev --show

and the app automatically opens in the right browser initially and when I change and save the code.

2

Then there are only two outstanding issues to solve

– The Bokeh/ Panel --dev reload is slow
– The app opens in a new tab instead of the existing.