cached / incremental execution ?

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I have the contents of a course that i’m trying to turn into a jupyter book; the initial process to build the book is very tedious, and especially so because

1. execution always restarts from the beginning
2. it’s painful to hide a broken notebook

let me explain :

1. first time I run ‘jupyter book build’ I see the execution of notebooks number, say, 1, 2 and 3; there’s an error in nb3, I fix it; at that point if I re-run ‘jupyter book build’ execution will restart from scratch and I’ll see again notebooks # 1, 2, 3, if I’m lucky 4, and so on; I can’t fathom how many zillion of times I’ll have executed notebook #1 at the end

2. in order to speed things up I’d like to kind of hide notebooks once they’re ok; so I try to comment them from the _toc file, but apparently that’s not effective; it feels like every single possible notebook in the directory gets executed !

Describe the solution you’d like

It’d make most sense to cache the result of executed notebooks; if that was the case my second point would of course become less of a problem, but I still feel like one should be allowed to have lingering, possibly broken, notebooks around, without that breaking an otherwise perfectly sound book

Additional context

I am wary that I might just have misunderstood, or misconfigured, the tool, I’d love to hear it if that’s the case

[parmentelat]

thanks for the answers; indeed exclude_patterns could come in handy !
on the longer run though, it’d be more convenient imho if
a) the tool could consider only the notebooks mentioned in the toc (preferred), or b) at least to have exclusions declared in the same file/location as the toc; (one could even think of having both of them merged, i.e. give the ability to define the toc as a subkey in the config); right now, when excluding one file it’s going to mean repeat the same info twice in 2 separate files…

[choldgraf]

closing this issue since I think it’s addressed, feel free to re-open if there’s something else to discuss! 🎉