Jupyter Notebook is a web-based development tool that makes it easier for developers to manage projects. With a user-friendly interface, Jupyter includes interactive elements to create and share live documents that contain code, visuals, equations, and even narrative texts.

I’ve already written about how to install Jupyter Notebook in my piece “ Jupyter Notebooks: The Web-Based Dev Tool You’ve Been Seeking,” so you should read through that tutorial to get Jupyter up and running.

Thing is, with a default Jupyter installation, you miss out on GitHub integration. And given how so many developers depend on the likes of GitHub, this is a feature that is sorely missed.

Fortunately, a developer has created an extension that makes it possible for you to use Jupyter with GitHub. Unfortunately, since the developer created the extension for Jupyter/GitHub, things have changed on the side of GitHub, so there’s one caveat to using this tool (I’ll explain later). But even with that caveat, this extension is a good way to keep your Jupyter Notebooks in sync with a GitHub repository (otherwise, all of those notebooks will remain on your local machine).

Let’s get these two pieces of technology connected.

Before you start this process, make sure you’ve taken care of getting Jupyter installed. Make sure you don’t launch a notebook yet. We’ll do that in a bit.

Installing the Extension

You’ve already installed the necessary dependencies for Jupyter (Python and pip). You now need to install the Jupyter GitHub extension. Log into your machine that contains Jupyter and open a terminal window. From the CLI, issue the following commands:

alias pip=pip3

pip install git+https://github.com/sat28/githubcommit.git

jupyter serverextension enable --py githubcommit

jupyter nbextension install --py githubcommit --user

jupyter nbextension enable githubcommit --user --py

The above commands will install the extension and make sure it is available for all notebooks.

#data #development #tutorial #github