Development Environment

This page outlines setting up a working development environment for working with the DataLab repository.

Environment Setup

Once you've cloned the repository locally, you'll need to setup your environment to include the tools and packages required to build and run the various components.

# Run once to setup tools
./tools/initonce.sh

# Run once per command prompt to setup environment vars etc.
source ./tools/initenv.sh

Dependencies

• Build system - Gradle 2.0
• Java - Java 1.7
• JavaScript - NodeJS 0.10.x, TypeScript 1.0
• Docker
• SDKs - gcloud
• Tools - ipython

Running Locally

DataLab is designed to be run within the cloud, specifically on Google Compute Engine and using Google Cloud Platform services. It relies on the metadata service available within the cloud to resolve contextual information such as current project id, and retrieve tokens to authorize cloud API calls. A tool is included in the repository to simulate this metadata service. Run the following commands:

# Setup gcloud (once)
gcloud auth login
gcloud config set project <your cloud project>

# Start local emulation of metadata service
node ./tools/metadata/server.js

Running IPython quickly

IPython notebooks can be used to work against BigQuery APIs provided by DataLab.

# Run ipython against an in-memory notebook model
ipym.sh

# Run ipython against a Google Cloud Storage-based notebook persistence
ipyc.sh

Check out the sample notebooks in the sample directory to get started.