CI: playwright-examples fails on nba-dashboard after plotly 7.0.0 removed ff.create_distplot #2476

playwright-examples is failing on every PR, in three shards:

File "py-shiny-templates/nba-dashboard/plots.py", line 41, in density_plot
    fig = ff.create_distplot(
AttributeError: module 'plotly.figure_factory' has no attribute 'create_distplot'

Nothing in py-shiny is involved — the traceback runs from _session.py straight out into the template's own code. But playwright-examples is a required dependency of the PR checks gate (.github/workflows/pytest.yaml:468), so the rolled-up check goes red on unrelated PRs.

Cause

plotly 7.0.0 (released 2026-08-25) removed twelve deprecated Figure Factory functions (plotly/plotly.py#5627), including create_distplot. Nothing in this repo uses any of the twelve — I grepped all of them — so the only affected code is nba-dashboard/plots.py in the templates repo. Fix tracked at posit-dev/py-shiny-templates#57.

Why it reached us with no commit here

.github/workflows/pytest.yaml:300-304 checks out the templates repo with no ref::

      - name: Checkout py-shiny-templates repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v6
        with:
          repository: posit-dev/py-shiny-templates
          path: py-shiny-templates

so it tracks that repo's default branch HEAD at run time, and make ci-install-py-shiny-templates-deps (Makefile:323) installs its unpinned requirements.txt. Any upstream template change, or any transitive dependency release, can turn py-shiny's CI red with no change on our side. That's arguably the point of the job — it catches real breakage — but it does mean unrelated PRs get blocked by it.

Worth deciding separately from the fix: whether to pin the checkout to a ref we bump deliberately, or keep it floating and treat these as a signal to fix upstream promptly.