Introduction

The oxlab package provides tools for Google Colab and Jupyter notebooks.

Sometimes you want to be able to use or distribute private GitHub repos in Jupyter notebooks that people may run on their local systems or in Google Colab. This project provides a simple way to accomplish that goal.

Imagine you have an example notebook called oxlab_demo.ipynb and you want to have it reference a private GitHub repo for your project.

You can take the following steps:

1. Generate an SSH deploy key for your project via something like:

   ssh-keygen -t ecdsa -f /tmp/example_deploy_key_id_ecdsa

2. Upload the public key (which is saved at /tmp/example_deploy_key_id_ecdsa.pub if you used the above command) to GitHub as discussed in the instructions on deploy keys.

3. Create a cell in your notebook like the following where you replace $YOUR_PRIVATE_KEY with your ssh deploy key generated in step 1 (e.g., the contents of /tmp/example_deploy_key_id_ecdsa), replace $OWNER with the owner of your GitHub repo (e.g., emin63) and $REPO with your repo (e.g., oxlab):

   # @title Pull in our private github repo
   SSH_DEPLOY_KEY = $YOUR_PRIVATE_KEY
   !pip install oxlab
   from oxlab import github
   oxlab.add_github_repo($OWNER, $REPO, SSH_DEPLOY_KEY)

4. Then the rest of your notebook will be able to do something like import $REPO and reference your private GitHub code.

See the oxlab_demo.ipynb notebook for an example.