Using VSCode(codeserver) on Google Colab

koji_kanao

Sep 17, 2020·2 min read

colabcode is an awesome python package since it allows us to use VSCode(codeserver) on Google Colab/Kaggle with only 3 lines.

3lines

!pip install colabcode
from colabcode import ColabCode
ColabCode(port=10000)

Tha’s it. jupyter notebook will show you a ngrok url to access VSCode.

Let me explain about those 3 lines a little bit.

Install PyPI package

As I mentioned, we need to install colabcode to use VSCode on Google Colab. The first line is to install the package.
Pretty straight forward.

!pip install colabcode

Run VSCode via colabcode

If you know python a little bit, these 2 lines are pretty easy to understand. from xxx import yyy is for importing a package. Then, the second is to create an instance. Done lol.

from colabcode import ColabCode
ColabCode(port=10000)

I would like to introduce a couple of parameters we can use to you.
ColabCode() can take a couple of arguments.

From https://github.com/abhishekkrthakur/colabcode/

optional arguments:
  --password PASSWORD  password to protect your code-server from unauthorized access
  --mount_drive        if you use --mount_drive, your google drive will be mounted

As you can see, port is required and the above arguments are optional. If you want to share your VSCode on Colab, maybe password may be useful.

How to Use

python

As you can see, what we will need to do is to open Terminal from the left corner icon. Then execute python test.py.
If you want to change the editor theme, you can do it by clicking Gear icon and select a theme.

nodejs

As you know, Google Colab is for python. However, with VSCode you can use nodejs. The version of nodejs is out of date, v8.11.3. But if you want to do something quickly with nodejs, this may be useful.