Julia-on-Colab

A notebook for running Julia 1.3.1 on Google Colab using the IJulia package.

Why?

When I started learning Julia few months back, I searched for an IDE or notebook to run Julia efficiently, but I struggled to get a GPU functioning on my own computer. There were no websites offering free cloud computing for Julia. I searched on Julia Discourse and Slack for weeks, and, after much trial and error, I came up with this solution.

I thought it would be good to share so that other beginners do not get similarly stuck as well.

Prerequisites

A Google account, that's all.

Using the Notebook

A step-by-step guide that tells you how to get the environment running:

Open the Jupyter notebook.
You can either download it or view it directly on Google Colab.
Run the first cell to install Julia and IJulia.

Note to the user

Since Google does not directly offer Julia-based computing you, have to take care:

You need to work from the same notebook to get access to a Julia 1.3 kernel.
You might lose connection to the host and, after re-connecting, you might lose your Julia packages that were installed. To tackle this situation, re-run the first cell and proceed with the follow up instructions in the notebook.
If you want to create your own notebook, I suggest you use this as a base notebook to work from.

Contributing

I received help from a lot of people on the Discourse and Slack. It is because of them this notebook is possible. I want to thank these communities and encourage you to participate in them.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.