This is a feature proposition. I find Renku very useful for sharing data and notebooks with my collaborators. I can just send them the link to the notebook in a renkulab project and they can see how I got the results and repeat them with the renku datasets I uploaded. On many occasions, the notebooks are too large to be shown in the renkulab preview, or preview is not possible if the notebook is stored in git lfs. It would be great to have a “Notebook previewer” that would display the HTML export of the notebook in renkulab, regardless of where the notebook is stored. This way my collaborators could quickly see the results without having to open a renkulab session.
The way it could work is that when the Renku session is saved, the notebooks could automatically be exported to HTML files. These files then could be loaded in a preview in renkulab.
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So something like https://nbviewer.org/ but built into renku…
Thank you very much @tomaszk ! We will consider your suggestion, and evaluate it to be included in our roadmap!
Any other Renku user interested in such a feature? If so, we are happy to hear from you!
On the UI, we can check whether an old limitation on LFS files is still preventing us from easily fetching and pre-viewing the content; if not, many notebooks might be easily rendered there.
Reference issue: Render bigger notebooks and fetch content from files stored in lfs · Issue #2616 · SwissDataScienceCenter/renku-ui · GitHub
gitlab pages could also fit this need if/when it’s enabled on renkulab - just putting HTML output in /public then pointing to the pages link. I mirror my renkulab repos where I want to do this to gitlab.com and use gitlab.io pages to serve the resource - you can also do this with github but the ‘pages’ mechanism is a bit different there. I wrote up instructions on mirroring repos here: HDBI Data Resource - 3 How To Store Your Data that page is itself a renku project mirrored to gitlab so I can serve it, so you can poke around in its source to see how I did that also if you like.
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