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 It is inspired by a REPL called gore and by a, no longer maintained and self-described as limited, ipython kernel call iGo.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:

Story telling and pattern recognition with Markdown and Golang:

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 --net host -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

• Dependencies:

  • Go (Tested with Go 1.5 and 1.6)
  • Jupyter (see here for more details on installing jupyter)
  • ZeroMQ (2.2.X or 4.x)

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

• Install goimports if you haven't already:

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

• Get the kernel:

  • with ZeroMQ 2.2.x:

    go get github.com/gophergala2016/gophernotes
    

  • with ZeroMQ 4.x:

    go get -tags zmq_4_x github.com/gophergala2016/gophernotes
    

• Create a directory for the new kernel config:

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

• Copy the kernel config into the jupyter directory:

  cp -r $GOPATH/src/github.com/gophergala2016/gophernotes/kernel/* ~/.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/gophergala2016/gophernotes/kernel/* ~/.ipython/kernels/gophernotes/
  

Local, OSX

• Assuming you're running with homebrew, install go:

  brew install go
  mkdir ~/go
  export GOPATH=$HOME/go
  export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/opt/go/libexec/bin:$GOPATH/bin
  

• You'll probably want to add the above exports to your .bashrc or equivalent.

• Install ZeroMQ:

  brew tap homebrew/versions
  brew install zeromq22
  brew link --force zeromq22
  

• Install gophernotes:

  go get golang.org/x/tools/cmd/goimports
  go get github.com/gophergala2016/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/
  
  

• Copy the kernel config:

  mkdir -p ~/.local/share/jupyter/kernels/gophernotes
  cp -r $GOPATH/src/github.com/gophergala2016/gophernotes/kernel/* ~/.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/gophergala2016/gophernotes/kernel/* ~/.ipython/kernels/gophernotes/
  

• Update ~/.local/share/jupyter/kernels/gophernotes/kernel.json with the path to your $GOPATH installation. If you used the path above, your file will look like:

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

:import <package path>  Import package
: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 was created by Takuya Ueda and is licensed under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attributions license.