gophernotes - Go in Notebooks

gophernotes is a Go kernel for Jupyter notebooks. Finally, we can have a reliable and maintained way to use Go interactively and code in the browser. Use gophernotes to create and share documents that contain live Go code, equations, visualizations and explanatory text. These notebooks, with the live Go code, can then be shared with others via email, Dropbox, GitHub and the Jupyter Notebook Viewer. Go forth and do data science, or anything else interesting, with go notebooks!

This project came out of the Gopher Gala 2016. It is inspired by a REPL called gore and by a, no longer maintained and self-described as limited, ipython kernel call iGo.

Screenshots/Examples

Simple interactive use:

Example Notebooks (dowload and run them locally, follow the links to view in Github, or use the Jupyter Notebook Viewer):

• Simple Printing and Channels
• Pattern Recognition with Golearn
• Feed Forward, Recurrent Neural Nets
• Time Parsing, Formatting
• Stateful Goroutines
• Worker Pools

Installation

Docker

• Pull down and run the latest image:

  docker pull dwhitena/gophernotes:latest
  docker run --name gophernotes --net host -d dwhitena/gophernotes:latest
  

Possible issues - For OSX Docker Machine / Dlite users, you may need to set the IP to 0.0.0.0 instead of the default localhost with:

docker run -p 8888:8888 -d dwhitena/gophernotes jupyter notebook --no-browser --ip=0.0.0.0

Note - this is a pretty large image, because it contains a full distribution of Anaconda plus the add ons of gophernotes. However, with this image, you can create Go notebooks, Python notebooks, text files, run ipython in the shell, etc.

Local, Linux

Make sure you have the following dependencies:

• Go 1.5+
• Jupyter (see here for more details on installing jupyter)
• ZeroMQ (2.2.X or 4.x)

Then:

1. Create a workspace and setup your GOPATH, see https://golang.org/doc/code.html#GOPATH

2. Install goimports if you haven't already:

go get golang.org/x/tools/cmd/goimports

3. Get the kernel:

• with ZeroMQ 2.2.x:

  go get github.com/gopherds/gophernotes
  

• with ZeroMQ 4.x:

  go get -tags zmq_4_x github.com/gopherds/gophernotes
  

4. Create a directory for the new kernel config:

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/jupyter/kernels/gophernotes

Note, depending on which version of jupyter you are using and if you are using Anaconda, you may need to copy to ~/.ipython rather than ~/.local/share:

mkdir ~/.ipython/kernels/gophernotes
cp -r $GOPATH/src/github.com/gopherds/gophernotes/kernel/* ~/.ipython/kernels/gophernotes/

5. Copy the kernel config into the ~/.local/jupyter directory:

cp -r $GOPATH/src/github.com/gopherds/gophernotes/kernel/* ~/.local/share/jupyter/kernels/gophernotes

Note, if you have the JUPYTER_PATH environmental variable set or if you are using an older version of Jupyter, you may need to copy this kernel config to another directory. You can check which directories will be searched by executing:

jupyter --data-dir

Local, OSX

Make sure you have the following dependencies:

• Go 1.5+
• Jupyter (see here for more details on installing jupyter)
• ZeroMQ (2.2.X or 4.x)

Then:

1. Install goimports, if not already installed:

go get golang.org/x/tools/cmd/goimports

2. Install gophernotes:

• with ZeroMQ 2.2.x:

  go get github.com/gopherds/gophernotes
  

• with ZeroMQ 4.x:

  go get -tags zmq_4_x github.com/gopherds/gophernotes
  

• if you get this error:

  # pkg-config --cflags libzmq libzmq libzmq libzmq
  Package libzmq was not found in the pkg-config search path.
  Perhaps you should add the directory containing `libzmq.pc'
  to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
  No package 'libzmq' found
  

  then:

  export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/Cellar/zeromq22/lib/pkgconfig/
  

3. Copy the kernel config:

mkdir -p ~/Library/Jupyter/kernels/gophernotes
cp -r $GOPATH/src/github.com/gopherds/gophernotes/kernel/* ~/Library/Jupyter/kernels/gophernotes

Note, if you have the JUPYTER_PATH environmental variable set or if you are using an older version of Jupyter, you may need to copy this kernel config to another directory. You can check which directories will be searched by executing:

jupyter --data-dir

4. Update ~/Library/Jupyter/kernels/gophernotes/kernel.json with the FULL PATH to your gophernotes binary (in $GOPATH/bin). For example:

{
    "argv": [
      "/Users/<your username>/go/bin/gophernotes",
      "{connection_file}"
      ],
    "display_name": "Go",
    "language": "go",
    "name": "go"
}

Getting Started

• If you completed one of the local installs above (i.e., not the Docker install), start the jupyter notebook:

  jupyter notebook
  

• Select Golang from the New drop down menu.

• Have Fun!

Troubleshooting

gophernotes not found

• Depending on your environment, you may need to manually change the path to the gophernotes executable in kernel/kernel.json before copying it to ~/.local/share/jupyter/kernels/gophernotes. You can put the full path to the gophernotes executable here, and you shouldn't have any further issues.

"Kernel error" in a running notebook

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/notebook/base/handlers.py", line 458, in wrapper
    result = yield gen.maybe_future(method(self, *args, **kwargs))
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/tornado/gen.py", line 1008, in run
    value = future.result()
  ...
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.11/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 1335, in _execute_child
    raise child_exception
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory

Stop jupyter, if it's already running.

Add a symlink to /go/bin/gophernotes from your path to the gophernotes executable. If you followed the instructions above, this will be:

sudo ln -s $HOME/go/bin/gophernotes /go/bin/gophernotes

Restart jupyter, and you should now be up and running.

Custom Commands

Some of the custom commands from the gore REPL have carried over to gophernotes. Note, in particular, the syntax for importing packages:

:print                  Show current source (currently prints to the terminal where the notebook server is running)
:write [<filename>]     Write out current source to file
:help                   List commands
:containerize           Build a Docker image that executes the compiled Go code (must have Docker installed)

Licenses

gophernotes was created by Daniel Whitenack, and is licensed under an MIT-style License.

The Golang Gopher image adapted for the gophernotes logo was created by Takuya Ueda and is licensed under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attributions license.