A simple implementation of Git Checkpoints for Jupyter Notebook geared toward use with JupyterHub.

Git Checkpoints replaces the file-based default checkpointing system with a version control system based on git. Most checkpoint operations (create, rename, delete) are handled by simply committing the changed file and pushing to a remote repo, while the Restore Checkpoint feature is accomplished by listing checking out one of the last 10 commit hashes for the file.

This package can be installed by cloning the repo and installing with pip:

git clone {this}
cd git_checkpoints
pip install .

This implementation assumes the use of a recent Jupyter Notebook release, an installation of Git in the system path with git callable from python and the Git wrapping package brigit

In order to inform Jupyter to use this Checkpoint implementation over the default implementation, we update our jupyter_notebook_config.py to include

import gitcheckpoints
c.ContentsManager.checkpoints_class = 'gitcheckpoints.GitCheckpoints'

This checkpoint implementation expects some environment variables to configure its behaviour. The required variables are:

DEPLOY_ENV=#an env name for naming branches, useful if hosting multiple users in multiple environments in the same repo

# Required for local install:
DEBUG_HOME=#where to initialize the git repo, defaults to os.environ['HOME']

Git Checkpoints also expects that information about git config are passed in as environment variables. If these are not passed in, Git Checkpoints will function locally, without pushing to a remote repo. In order to push to the repo, provide:

# Git config, used to construct URL to remote. If not provided, operate without remote
GIT_USER=#git username
GIT_PASS=#password
GIT_EMAIL=#some email
GIT_URL=#remote url

With the basic git checkpointing system in place, users will be able to directly interact with git in order to create/change/merge branches, point to custom remote endpoints, while leveraging the integrated commit/push functionality of Jupyter Notebook's Save and Checkpoint as well as Restore Checkpoint. Users should be careful when altering the default branches as merge conflicts can and will become an issue that must be handled in the normal way.