Colab Enterprise: Cloning github repos and opening notebooks?

[jasonbrancazio]

The integration between the Model Garden and Colab Enterprise is great, but I feel Colab Enterprise is missing one key feature from Colab, as well as Vertex AI Workbench: the ability to quickly open a notebook from any arbitrary GitHub repository.

With Colab, I can simply change "github.com" to "colab.research.google.com/github" in the URL and open the notebook.

With Vertex AI Workbench, I can clone the repository and open the notebook from the file browser.

You can use the Terminal in Colab Enterprise to clone a repository, and you can see the files downloaded using the Files tab once a Colab Enterprise notebook is open, but it's a ruse: when you click the file, it opens in a separate tab, not rendered as a notebook and not executable.

Is this in fact a product limitation, or am I doing something wrong?

I'm not alone in my confusion:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/77326806/how-to-open-a-notebook-from-github-in-colab-enterprise

I realize that one can manually download and upload notebooks, but that's not a particularly attractive option.

[nceniza]

This is the closest feature I can get from Vertex AI documentation: https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/docs/workbench/instances/save-to-github

But this is to Github not the other way around from what I understand from your inquiry.

I would suggest though to file this as a Feature Request as its looks like a neat and convenient feature when it gets available to the instances/Collab enterprise.

You can file here: 

https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/issue-trackers#feature_requests

[nimrah-waqar]

Seems like the ability to quickly open a notebook from any arbitrary GitHub repository directly within Colab Enterprise is currently not available. This limitation might be due to the product's design or implementation. 

You can keep an eye on updates or feature releases from Colab Enterprise to see if this functionality gets added in the future. In the meantime, manually downloading and uploading notebooks may be the workaround solution, although it's not as convenient as direct integration with GitHub.

[jasonbrancazio]

I've created a feature request. Thanks.