Anvil Reactive

Automatic client-side updates for Anvil apps.

Install

Add third-party dependency N7KFE4YBWMGWJ5OX to your Anvil app, then import from anvil_reactive.main.

See the installation guide and quick start.

Documentation

The documentation site covers tracking, signals and reactive classes, computed values and effects, reactive collections, component bindings, server calls inside effects, and the complete API.

Examples

See the quick start and the original Anvil Community Forum post.

Develop

Use uv to run the pinned development tools and install Chromium:

uv run --isolated --with-requirements requirements-dev.txt \
  playwright install chromium

Run the CPython tests, real App Server client suite, and documentation build:

PYTHONPATH=. uv run --isolated --with-requirements requirements-dev.txt \
  pytest -q tests
PYTHONPATH=. uv run --isolated --with-requirements requirements-dev.txt \
  pytest -q client_tests/test_client.py
uv run --isolated --with-requirements requirements-docs.txt \
  mkdocs build --strict

The client suite requires Java 21 and starts anvil-app-server==1.17.0 in a temporary workspace. On Apple Silicon it also uses Docker for PostgreSQL.

Publish documentation

Set up Read the Docs

The repository is configured for Read the Docs in .readthedocs.yaml. Builds use Python 3.12, uv, and the pinned packages in requirements-docs.txt.

To connect the project:

1. Sign in to Read the Docs with GitHub and import anvilistas/reactive.
2. Name the project anvil-reactive, if that name is available, and select main as the default branch. Keep latest as the default documentation version initially.
3. Once this configuration is merged, build latest. Verify the home page, navigation, and /en/latest/llms.txt on the project's assigned domain.
4. After the first successful build, update the documentation links in this README and the fallback site_url in mkdocs.yml, then retire the GitHub Pages deployment workflow. Keep Pages available until the new site works.

Read the Docs supplies the canonical URL for each build. Release tags created after this configuration is merged can also be enabled as documentation versions. Older tags do not contain the build configuration.

Current GitHub Pages site

GitHub Pages publishes the MkDocs site at https://anvilistas.github.io/reactive/. The repository uses Settings > Pages > Build and deployment > Source: GitHub Actions.

Merge documentation changes into main to deploy automatically. Once the deployment workflow is on main, you can also start it with the GitHub CLI:

gh workflow run deploy-docs.yml --ref main
gh run list --workflow deploy-docs.yml --limit 1

Use gh run watch <run-id> --exit-status to follow that deployment. The built site includes llms.txt at its root; contributor plans and research notes are excluded from publication.