Jupyter Storage Explorer

A file explorer for cloud storage and data lakes, right inside your Jupyter notebook, in the spirit of Azure Storage Explorer.

Browse Amazon S3, Azure Data Lake / Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, local disks and more; preview Parquet files, Delta Lake tables, CSV, Excel, JSON and other formats; page through, sort and filter tables; get ready-to-run code that loads the data into your notebook; and upload, download, move and edit files without leaving JupyterLab.

Two widgets:

• StorageExplorer: the file explorer, with previews and the data browser.
• DataExplorer: the data browser alone, for a dataframe (pandas, polars, Spark, DuckDB, ...).

Installation

pip install jupyter-storage-explorer

Install the package for your storage too:

On Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, pip install "jupyter-storage-explorer[abfs]" and operations=[AzureDataLakeGen2Operation(), *StorageExplorer.default_operations()] (from jupyter_storage_explorer.filesystems.abfs) move folders in one step and create empty folders.

Previewing and querying data files needs a data library, e.g. pip install polars deltalake. If one is missing, the preview tells you what to install.

Quick start

from jupyter_storage_explorer import StorageExplorer

StorageExplorer("s3://my-bucket/data")

The explorer appears as the cell's output. Other examples:

StorageExplorer()  # the current folder
StorageExplorer("abfs://lake@myaccount.dfs.core.windows.net/raw")  # Azure Data Lake
StorageExplorer("s3://my-bucket/data", profile="analytics")  # Amazon S3, with options
StorageExplorer("gs://my-bucket", token="google_default")  # Google Cloud

Options after the address (like profile above) are passed to the storage package, for example to choose credentials.

To browse a dataframe, see DataExplorer. The notebooks folder has a demo of each widget (storage_explorer.ipynb, data_explorer.ipynb) on sample data made by make_samples.py.

From the JupyterLab launcher

The separate package jupyter-storage-explorer-launcher adds Storage Explorer to JupyterLab's launcher and command palette, opening the explorer in its own tab on the launcher's folder (the one the file browser showed):

pip install jupyter-storage-explorer-launcher

What the tab shows is configured with launcher.py files, for the whole system and for each user; see the launcher's README.

Several storages in one explorer

Give each storage a name; a drop-down on the left of the address bar switches between them, and each one remembers the folder you were in.

StorageExplorer(
    filesystems={
        "Data lake": "abfs://lake@myaccount.dfs.core.windows.net",
        "Raw files (S3)": "s3://my-bucket/raw",
        "Local": "/home/me/data",
    },
)

Using the explorer

• Browse: click folders in the tree or list; ↑ goes up, ⟳ refreshes. Ctrl+click (⌘+click) selects several items. The list shows 100 items per page (◀ ▶ above it).
• Filter: type in the fields above the tree and the list (and in Select columns of the data browser) to show only names containing the text, or matching a regular expression with .*. Case is ignored; ✕ or Esc clears.
• Preview: double-click a file, or Preview (with nothing selected: the current folder, e.g. a Delta Lake table). Tables open in the data browser.
• Right-click: Preview as, Edit, Python code to load the data, Copy, Cut, Paste, Delete, Create a folder, Download to local or to JupyterLab (see Options), Copy URL.
• Copy, cut and paste work between storages and between explorers, also in other notebooks: Cut, then Move here, moves files to another storage.
• Drag and drop: drop files from JupyterLab's file browser or your computer to upload them; drag files onto a folder to move them, or onto JupyterLab's file browser to download them (needs the launcher).
• In the background: moving, deleting, pasting and downloading to JupyterLab run while you keep browsing, with their progress above the status bar and Cancel.

Unsafe operations

Folder operations need Unsafe mode, turned on with the slider in the status bar:

Query data

With polars installed (plus deltalake for Delta Lake, fastexcel for Excel), tables open in a data browser that reads 1,000 rows at a time:

• ◀ ▶ to page, click a column name to sort, its funnel to filter (Null / empty, Range, Contains, Regex).
• Select columns to hide columns, drag a header's edge to resize, Reset to clear filters, ⟳ to reload.
• Live / In memory (top right): query the data itself, or read its first 100,000 rows into memory once and query those (faster, but filters and sorting then apply to those rows only). Data of up to 1,000 rows is always kept in memory.

Filters, sorting, hidden columns and widths are remembered per table until the kernel restarts, or in a file with query_settings=QuerySettingsStore("query-settings.json") (from jupyter_storage_explorer.query). polars reads the data with the credentials in the environment, not the explorer's options.

Supported formats

The name identifies the format in CSS (see Customizing icons).

Format options

format_options is one dictionary for all formats; each format uses the options it takes. Options are named after the library they are for, and the ones for a single format also after the format:

StorageExplorer(
    "s3://my-bucket/lake",
    format_options={
        "polars_storage_options": {"aws_region": "eu-west-1"},
        "pandas_storage_options": {"anon": False},
        "polars_delta_use_pyarrow": True,
    },
)

Storage options that look like credentials are left out of the code. Without storage options, the code relies on the environment's configuration and credentials.

Working with the explorer from Python

explorer = StorageExplorer("s3://my-bucket/data")
explorer

explorer.folder_url  # the URL of the folder shown, e.g. to pass to polars or pandas
explorer.selected_urls  # the URLs of the selected items

StorageExplorer options

DataExplorer: browse a dataframe

DataExplorer opens the same data browser for a dataframe in your notebook: pandas, polars, PyArrow, DuckDB, Spark, and the other libraries narwhals supports.

import polars as pl
from jupyter_storage_explorer import DataExplorer, QuerySettings

DataExplorer(pl.scan_parquet("s3://my-bucket/lake/sales/*.parquet"))
DataExplorer(spark.table("sales"), mode="memory")  # read the first rows into memory
DataExplorer(orders_df, settings=QuerySettings(sort="date", descending=True))

Lazy data starts Live, eager data In memory. Pass a function (lambda: pl.scan_parquet(url)) for ⟳ to read the data again.

explorer.result() gives the data with the widget's filters, sort order and hidden columns applied, as a dataframe of the same library (lazy data stays lazy), to continue your analysis in code:

explorer = DataExplorer(pl.scan_parquet("sales/*.parquet"))
# ... filter and sort in the widget ...
explorer.result().group_by("region").agg(pl.col("amount").sum()).collect()

QuerySettings sets the filters, sort order, hidden columns and widths to start with. To keep settings made in the widget, print them as text and paste them into your code:

explorer = DataExplorer(orders_df)
print(explorer.settings.to_json())  # after filtering and sorting in the widget

DataExplorer(orders_df, settings=QuerySettings.from_json("""
{
    "filters": {"price": {"op": "range", "min": "10", "max": ""}},
    "sort": {"column": "date", "descending": true},
    "hidden": ["comment"],
    "widths": {}
}
"""))

DataExplorer options

Requirements

• Python 3.11 or later
• JupyterLab 4. The widgets also show in other Jupyter frontends, but dragging files from JupyterLab's file browser works only in JupyterLab.
• For Query data: a recent polars (tested with polars 2.0). DataExplorer works with any dataframe narwhals supports; with polars installed, data in memory is queried with polars, which is faster.

Development

Building from source, the JupyterLab extension, releasing, and customizing the explorer's icons with CSS: see DEVELOPMENT.md.