Colab-ssh

Connect to Google colab via ssh easily

🎉 Happy to announce that we now support VSCode direct links when you use init_git

What is Colab-ssh

Colab-ssh is a light-weight library that enables you to connect to a Google Colab virtual machine using an SSH tunnel.

Can I open the Colab notebook automatically without user interaction ?
No, you still need to open the Google Colab Notebook interface manually in order to setup this tool. Google Colab doesn't have an API yet to automatically run a notebook for you.

Getting started

Open Google Colab and run this code in one of the code cells

# Install colab_ssh on google colab
!pip install colab_ssh --upgrade

from colab_ssh import launch_ssh, init_git
launch_ssh(ngrokToken,password)

# Optional: if you want to clone a github repository
init_git(githubUrl)

ngrokToken is your ngrok token that you can get from here
password is an optional parameter, this is your ssh password that you want to set.
githubUrl is your github HTTPS clone url (usually ends with .git)

Check all the parameters for the launch_ssh function in this section

Cloning a repository (Optional)

If you are a Github fan, you probably want to clone a repository (private or public) to the Google Colab Notebook. This is why init_git is created.

What `init_git` does:

Clones the repository
Uses your personal token (if you provided it) to setup the repository remote URL (this is useful so you don't have to worry about authentication during git clone or git push )
Checkout the branch of your preference
Sets up the user.email and user.name for you, in case you need to commit.
Also, it inserts the cloned folder to the sys.path. This is helpful when your cloned repository is a python project and you want to import some python modules directly (without specifying the name of the root folder) to your Google Colab Notebook. Example: If you cloned a repository called example-repo. A folder should be created containing your cloned repository. If example-repo has a python module called my_module, instead of writing in your notebook import example-repo.my_module, you can simply do import my_module.

Example:

init_git("https://github.com/<OWNER>/<REPO_NAME>.git",
         personal_token="<YOUR_GITHUB_PERSONAL_TOKEN>", 
         branch="<YOUR_BRANCH>",
         email="<YOUR_EMAIL>",
         username="<YOUR_USERNAME>")

The output of this command will look like this:

Successfully cloned the repository
[Optional] You can open the cloned folder using VSCode, by clicking cloned_repo_name

The cloned_repo_name will be shown as a link inside the notebook output (or a url in case of a terminal). This is a direct link to open VSCode directly.

Link doesn't appear or doesn't work?

Make sure you have VSCode installed locally for the link to work

Make sure that you run launch_ssh before init_git. The reason for that is because init_git shows the link based on the tunnel information provided by the function launch_ssh.

Avoiding passwords (Optional)

Instead of setting a password, you can access the SSH tunnel using your own pair of keys.

IMPORTANT: For this to work you need to setup your git repository by using the function init_git()

How it works ?

We get your public key from the repository passed into the init_git() function and then we add it to the authorized_keys file (found in ~/.ssh folder).

You need to follow these steps:

Create a pair of SSH key
Copy your public key (should be inside the file id_rsa.pub)
In the root of your github repository, create a folder called .colab_ssh and a file within it called authorized_keys
Paste your public key inside the file .collab_ssh/authorized_keys

Using VSCode to connect Google Colab

Once you run the code in the Getting Started section you will notice a message like this

...
Successfully running tcp://0.tcp.ngrok.io:XXXX
...

XXXX is the port provided by ngrok

You can now open VSCode and add this to your SSH Configuration

Host google_colab_ssh
  HostName 0.tcp.ngrok.io
  User root
  Port XXXX

Make sure you replace XXXX with the port you just obtained

Then connect to the remote google_colab_ssh.

API Reference

`launch_ssh` function

This function accepts the following parameters

Parameter	Type	Required	Default value	Description
`token`	string	✔️	-	Your ngrok token
`password`	string	-	None	The SSH password you want to set, if empty no password will be set. Usually you don't need passwords when you already have an ssh key setup
`verbose`	boolean	-	False	Show more information under the hood
`region`	string	-	`us`	The region you want to setup for ngrok. This can be one of the following: `us`, `eu`, `au`, `ap`, `sa`, `jp`, `in`. See the official Ngrok documenation for more information.
~~`publish`~~	-	-	-	Deprecated

`init_git` function

init_git allows you to clone a repository (private or public) and sets up the right remote URL without the need for authentication every time you open the notebook, this is achieved by setting your github personal token.