nbdev / colab helper

Tools and tutorials to help working with nbdev in google colab.

Warning

While nbdev is making breaking changes, this project is pinned to version 1.0.14 of nbdev - which has been yanked.

Changes to the fastai version of nbdev_template make it incompatible with nbdev 1.0.14 - but you can still work with my fork of nbdev template.

Please consider this a temporary solution - we'll update this project to use the latest version of nbdev once the breaking changes have slowed down.

See this issue for details.

Install in colab

Run the following code cell in a colab notebook:

!pip install git+https://github.com/pete88b/nbdev_colab_helper.git

TODO: Create pip package or move to nbdev?

How to use

The goal of this project is to make it as easy as possible to work with nbdev and github without leaving colab.

Regular nbdev notebooks

As you can see from this notebook, you don't have to !pip install nbdev in every notebook.

You can use the following pattern to avoid running colab specific things in non-colab environments, like mounting your google drive:

IN_COLAB = 'google.colab' in str(get_ipython())
if IN_COLAB:
  from google.colab import drive

or installing nbdev:

if IN_COLAB:
  !pip install git+https://github.com/fastai/nbdev.git

Now that nbdev is available to the runtime, you can from nbdev import * and start using magic flags, show_doc etc.

The colab helper notebook

Having a colab helper notebook gives you a place to do the things you would do from the command line in a non-colab environment (like running nbdev or git commands). Feel free to use this notebook as a starter.

Before we can run nbdev or git commands in a colab helper notebook, we need to set-up the colab runtime via a call to nbdev_colab_helper.core.setup_project.

After mounting your google drive to /content/drive, setup_project looks for /content/drive/My Drive/nbdev_colab_projects.ini: which must have a section for the project you are setting up.

Warning: Your nbdev_colab_projects.ini should live outside your nbdev projects. Please don't share this file, or push to githib etc

Here's an example nbdev_colab_projects.ini with sections for 2 projects:

[DEFAULT]
project_parent = /content/drive/My Drive/Colab Notebooks/github
 
git_user_name = **changeme**
git_user_email = **changeme**@gmail.com
git_user_password = **changeme**
 
[nbdev_colab_helper]
git_url = https://github.com/pete88b/nbdev_colab_helper.git
git_branch = master
 
[nbdev_demo]
git_url = https://github.com/pete88b/nbdev_demo.git
git_branch = main

See ConfigParser for details on how this file can be formatted.

The name of the colab helper notebook is not important and it doesn't have to be part of your nbdev project - you could manage any number of nbdev projects from a single colab helper notebook.