Ask HN: Can I connect a Google Colab instance to Jetbrains Dataspell? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can I connect a Google Colab instance to Jetbrains Dataspell?

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I’ve been trying to find a a way to connect a Colab instance to Dataspell but there doesn’t seem to be a way of doing it, if anyone here has managed to do it I’d love to know how.

Running a local Notebook server on windows has proven to be kind of annoying (the server that’s integrated with Dataspell) because it always has some sort of an issue downloading PyPi packages on Windows so much so that I’ve had to use Ubuntu with WSL as the server. Even Pycharm with virtualenvs was running into some of these issues while attempting to work on other projects… and I’m not downloading some obscure PyPi package… even popular projects like Flask and the Requests package we’re having issues.

Yes. In (probably) the bottom right of your screen, where you selected the Python interpreter you're using, there's an Remote Server option. Click on it to open up the window, click the 'Add Interpreter' link in the top right (next to where the current interpreter is listed) and you have the choice to add one locally or via SSH.

I have not had problems with PyPi on Mac or windows, but when I started using Pycharm and later Dataspell I did experience a lot of confusion setting up the interpreter. If you installed Anaconda and tried to do things through their defaults it was just one problem after another. I later found that Anaconda package management headaches are widespread and if you absolutely have to use it then you're better off with MiniConda.

As for Jetbrains products, once I figured out how to configure the Python interpreter and switched to using my own venv I had no more problems. I love Jetbrains' products but the configuration is sometimes hard to wrap your head around.

I actually looked a little more into it and I found out that Google recently prohibited SSHing into a Colab instance, so it’s not possible anymore sadly :(

Oh that sucks! I had been looking forward to trying it too. Well I hope you figure out how to manage the local environment, it took me a while but it works great once you get the hang of it.

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