jupyter nbconvert with R plotly figures not rendering

Question

I have a jupyter notebook running an R kernel and containing plotly figures, e.g.:

library(plotly)
x = c(1,2,3,4,5)
y = c(5,6,7,8,9)
fig = plot_ly(x=x, y=y, type='scatter', mode='markers')
fig

Everything looks good when running the notebook, but when using nbconvert:

$ jupyter nbconvert myNotebook.ipynb --to html --execute

I get an HTML file where the figures are not rendered at all. This does not happen when using plotly in python.
I tried explicitly displaying the figure, like this:

library(plotly)
library(IRdisplay)
x = c(1,2,3,4,5)
y = c(5,6,7,8,9)
fig = plot_ly(x=x, y=y, type='scatter', mode='markers')
display(fig)

but the same result was obtained.
Apparently there has been some github talk back in 2020, but I couldn't find any solution.
Anybody can help with resolving this or suggesting some workaround? Maybe even exporting to static figures?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Just in case someone gets here in the future - I found a workaround using R markdown. It goes something like this:

library(rmarkdown)
convert_ipynb('mynotebook.ipynb', output = xfun::with_ext('mynotebook.ipynb', "Rmd"))
render('mynotebook.Rmd', output_format = "html_document")

I have no idea why this works, but it does! plotly figures are rendered.