In our initial release of Tower we offered data teams the ability to deploy and run batch job- or pipeline-like data applications. But our users asked for more and we are happy to announce a beta of interactive apps in Tower. You can now deploy notebooks in Tower and let your end-users run interactive data expiration sessions. You can also deploy APIs that respond to external calls. All of this is enabled by a new capability to address Tower application runs via externally accessible URLs.
We think it’ll make sharing access to your data much more straightforward, both for you and your team, and your external stakeholders.
Marimo Notebooks as an Example of Interactive Tower Apps
Marimo is a Python notebook environment designed for modern data workflows, enabling reactive execution, interactivity, and reproducibility. Marimo notebooks are pure Python files, so they work smoothly with version control and modern software practices, unlike traditional notebooks like Jupyter.
Notebooks have become essential tools for data teams to prototype, analyze, and build interactive applications. They bring together code, results, and explanations, making them ideal for collaborative, data-driven work.
Tower’s interactive, externally-accessible apps give you even more flexibility. Now, you can turn a Marimo notebook into a live, shareable app right inside of Tower.
Just deploy your Marimo notebook, share its URL, and that’s it. Your notebook will now run as an interactive app, served securely through Tower.
Endless Ways to Use Tower for Interactive Use Cases
This capability just enabled a bunch of new use cases for Tower:
BI Dashboards: Allow analysts or stakeholders to easily view structured, live data.
Data Entry & Collection Tools: Let end users input or update data through a simple interface.
API serving: Deploy an API endpoint and serve API requests
That’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what you can do. We know Tower users get creative with their apps, so share your custom use cases with us, and we might even feature them!
How to Get Started with Tower’s Interactive Apps
Log into app.tower.dev.
Deploy your Tower app.
Set a subdomain in app settings so others can access it, for example colorful-river-434.app.tower.dev
Share the subdomain link with your users.
Your app only runs when the subdomain is active.
If your app sits idle, it turns itself off automatically, and turns back on only when a user visits the app URL again.
Here's what the process looks like.
Try our our Merimo notebook example
We built a simple example app on our own for you to try out. It's available in our Github examples folder. It's the one we launch in the example video above. Play around with it!
Deploy your interactive app now
Now you can turn notebooks into interactive Tower apps with just a few clicks. It’s the easiest way to share data analytics insights with anyone on your business team.