CLI Documentation

This is the official documentation for the CLI version of pylabnotebook. All commands explained here have a corresponding function (see API), but I highly reccomend to run this package from the command line, as it was created for.

Installation

Pylabnotebook can be installed via pip in an isolated environment (suggested):

(.venv) $ pip install pylabnotebook

To check the installation:

(.venv) $ labnotebook --version

Warning

Whilst the python dependencies are automatically downloaded and installed, this package highly relies on git. Therefore, there are some git requirements that need to be fullfilled:

• git version >= 2.40.1, otherwise some functionalities do not work

• git author and git email set, otherwise the tool cannot create a notebook, as it checks for git author.

Init a notebook

To init a new notebook, just type the following code in any folder of a git directory:

(.venv) $ labnotebook init -n "my project"

A message that confirms the creation of the .labnotebookrc file should appear on the console as stout.

Note

Remember to never change the name of .labnotebookrc file.

Export a notebook

To export the notebook as a single .html file, from the root of the project type:

(.venv) $ labnotebook export -o my_project.html

It will create a my_project.html file with the notebook. You can then share the notebook with peers.

Notebook customization

There are several customization that can be applied to the notebook:

• you can provide your personal css file by setting it in the .labnotebookrc file in LAB_CSS variable.

• you can decide to show commits from last to first (default) or from first to last (changing REVERSE_HISTORY variable in .labnotebookrc to True).

• you can change name and author of the notebook in .labnotebookrc, it will be passed to file when exporting the notebook.

Link to analysis files

When exporting the notebook, it automatically create a list of analysis files for each commit with direct links to them (starting from git folder root directory). By default, it takes all the .html files changed/added in that commit (not the deleted or renamed ones).

If you want to add different extensions, you can update the .labnotebookrc file by adding/removing extensions in the ANALYSIS_EXT variable. Each extension should be separated by a comma, as it is considered a list (eg. “ANALYSIS_EXT”: [‘.html’, ‘.txt’]): just type the extension, not wildcards or other special characters.

Moreover, changing values inside “ANALYSIS_IGNORE” list, you can exclude some files/folders to be recognized as analysis files (as for a standard .gitignore file it will use wildcards).

If you want to disable all links, pass the no-link flag to the export command.