Tools for Colab in the Physics Lab

Tools to support the use of Google Colab + GitHub for teaching undergraduate physics labs. Support for private repositories enables the use of GitHub Classroom.

Starting in version 2.0 the conditional importation of Colab-specific components was enabled, allowing the more general tools to be used in other environments (such as in a VS Code notebook running locally).

Installation

!pip install whit-phys-util

Importing

To import the package after installation:

import whit_phys_util

Creating a GitHub credentials file

If you will be regularly connecting GitHub private repositories to Colab sessions, the recommendation is to create a file containing your GitHub info and store it in your Google Drive.

1. Create a file with the name .env or dotenv using the plain text editor of your choice.
2. This file should have the following format:

   # for git
   user_email = "yourname@host"
   user_name = "your_GitHub_user_name"
   gh_token = "GitHub_personal_access_token"
   

   In my case "yourname@host" was "jlarkin@whitworth.edu" and "your_GitHub_user_name" was "JohnMLarkin".
3. Next, login to GitHub and select Settings from the menu hiding under your profile picture.
4. Select Developer settings from the sidebar and then Personal access tokens.
5. Click on the Generate new token button.
6. Note is your name for this token so you can remember what it does and where it is used. Picking something like Colab repo link makes that clear.
7. Check the repo box and then the Generate token button.
8. Copy this token and paste it into your .env/dotenv file in place of GitHub_personal_access_token.
9. Move this file to the top-level folder of your Google Drive.

Working with a GitHub repository

Clone a repository to Colab session storage

Replace REPO_URL with the URL to your private GitHub repository:

repo = whit_phys_util.local_repository("REPO_URL")

If your Google Drive is not already mounted to this Colab session, you will be prompted to do so. If you created the GitHub credentials file as described above, this will then create a clone of the repository located in /content/REPO_NAME. Your current working directory will also be changed to this folder.