[jmwoliver]

Fixes #923.

Problem

rsconnect deploy notebook --static renders the notebook locally with nbconvert and uploads a bundle containing only the HTML and a manifest.json with no python section. But deploy_notebook set up the deployment environment before checking --static, so a static deploy:

• failed without a requirements.txt unless given --force-generate, which ran pip freeze and discarded the output;
• failed on an renv.lock that R dependency detection rejects (renv.lock is not compatible: missing Repositories section), even though nothing from R goes into the bundle;
• required rsconnect to be installed in the --python interpreter, because environment inspection runs python -m rsconnect.subprocesses.inspect_environment there. Rendering only needs nbconvert.

Fix

With --static, deploy_notebook now only calls which_python(python) to find the interpreter that runs nbconvert. It skips resolve_requirements_file, Environment.create_python_environment and REnvironment.create. Deploys without --static don't change.

Tests

The existing static tests mocked create_python_environment and used a fixture directory with a requirements.txt, which is how this was missed. They now run without mocking environment setup:

• test_deploy_notebook_static_needs_no_environment: a notebook alone in a temp directory, and one with requirements.txt plus an incompatible renv.lock. Asserts the deploy succeeds, make_notebook_html_bundle gets the current interpreter (covering When deploying Jupyter notebooks --static doesn't work. #721 as well), and no files are written into the directory.
• test_deploy_notebook_static_renders_with_python_option: --python is passed through as the rendering interpreter.
• test_deploy_static_notebook_render_failure passes its interpreter with --python instead of a mocked environment. Its missing_nbconvert case uses a bare venv without rsconnect, which previously could not get past environment inspection.

All six tests fail on main for the reasons above and pass with this change. The full suite passes locally (1850 passed, 15 skipped) and ruff is clean.

Options that have no effect with --static (--requirements-file, --force-generate, etc.) are still accepted silently. A stacked follow-up PR warns about them.

[github-actions]

PR Preview Action v1.8.1
Preview removed because the pull request was closed.
2026-11-06 20:27 UTC

[github-actions]

☂️ Python Coverage

current status: ✅

Overall Coverage

Lines	Covered	Coverage	Threshold	Status
11187	9961	89%	0%	🟢

New Files

No new covered files...

Modified Files

File	Coverage	Status
rsconnect/main.py	89%	🟢
TOTAL	89%	🟢

updated for commit: 439a675 by action🐍

[joshyam-k]

defer to @tdstein here, but at a high level this looks like an obviously correct fix.

[tdstein]

There are some conflicts with #920, which I just merged. I'll go ahead and fix them since I have the branch pulled down.