Datalab

Introduction

An extension to the medium post by Lak Lakshmanan.

The basic premise is to allow Datalab to run locally, so no network connection is required. This repository enables Crostini enabled Chromebooks to get in on the fun.

Pixelbook installation

By default on a linux enabled Pixelbook, there should already a virtual machine created. To access the virtual machine instance, press CTRL-ALT-T on the keyboard to open a CROSH browser tab.

Personally when I am experimenting with new configurations, I like to do this in a separate VM. If you would rather create this in the default VM, please ignore this step and start the default VM as usual.

Create a new VM

To begin, lets create a new vm named sandbox. We will conduct our test in this VM and attempt to isolate any changes to this environment.

vmc start sandbox

We are now working within our VM. Let’s commence experimentation by making a Linux container. In this instance we will create a container based on the debian stretch operating system and name it “datalab”.

lxc launch image:debian/stretch datalab

Once the image has been downloaded, we should be able to see the list of existing containers using the following command:

lxc list

Note: the container will not automatically be started once created.

To start the container and perform some configuration, use the following command:

lxc exec datalab /bin/bash

We are now within the container and we can see that our user shown as part of the command line has changed now root@datalab.

Ensure the container has the updates applied.

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

• Docker installation link
• GCloud SDK link
• Ngrok installation link
• Datalab-init (see added BASH script)

Note: Datalab- init references needs to point to where your code resides. In my case, code sits in the rosera-datalab/code directory as per the configuration in the Datalab-init script.

./datalab-init.sh

At this point, there should be a running container serving Datalab. The final step is to add a proxy to enable access via a browser.

• ngrok link

NGROK is an awesome tool for establishing a proxy on your machine. In a new window, start a proxy service to access datalab via the enabled port.

Example: ./ngrok http-region eu 8081

Once Ngrok is running, there will be a number proxy values displayed. Take a note of this information as this data contains the URI to access Datalab browser interface.

• Chrome Connection Forwarder link

Connection Forwarder is a Chrome extension that does the same job as Ngrok, only its much more user friendly. Open the port 8081 using this extension.

Issues

Please feel free to fork the code and raise a pull request for any changes to be applied. Let me know if you find it helpful.