Sharing notebooks

Objectives

Learn how to share notebooks with colleagues and the community?

Instructor note

5 min teaching
20 min exercises

Nudge your brain: When have you shared your code?

To yourself between two computers?
To a large audience eg. on a webpage?
Coding together with a colleague?

Optional exercises

Importance of tracking dependencies

(Optional) Exercise: what happens without requirements.txt?

Let’s look at the same activity inequality repository.

Start the repository in Binder using this link.
fig3/fig3bc.ipynb is a Python notebook, so it works in Binder. Most others are in R, which also works in Binder. But how?
Try to run the notebook. What happens?
Most likely the run breaks down immediately in the first cell:
```
%matplotlib inline
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
sns.set(style="whitegrid")
from itertools import cycle
```
We get a long list of ModuleNotFoundError messages. This is because the required Python packages have not been installed and can not be imported. The missing packages include, at least, pandas and matplotlib mentioned in the error message.
To install the missing requirements, add a new code cell to the beginning of the notebook with the contents
```
!python3 -m pip install pandas matplotlib
```
and run the notebook again. What happens now?
Again, the run breaks due to missing packages. This time the culprit is the seaborn package. Modify the first cell to also install it with
```
!python3 -m pip install pandas matplotlib seaborn
```
and try to run the notebook for the third time. Does it finally work? What could have been done differently by the developer?
A good way to make a notebook more usable is to create a requirements.txt file containing the necessary packages to run the notebook and add it next to the notebook in the repository.
In this case, the requirements.txt could look like this
```
pandas
matplotlib
seaborn
```
and to make sure the packages are installed, one could add a code cell to the beginning of original notebook with the line:
```
!python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt
```
To make sure that the notebook will continue to work also in few months, you might want to specify also the version in the requirements.txt file.

Sharing notebooks

Different ways to share a notebook

Commercial offers with free plans

Sharing dynamic notebooks on Binder

Optional exercises

Importance of tracking dependencies

Sharing an interactive notebook on Binder

Sharing dynamic notebooks on Binder 