I find working in a Jupyter Notebook very useful when developing any type of python code. The instant feedback of newly written code helps me a lot to iterate quickly and debug certain snippets.
There is a small tweak that you can do to also import your python modules and functions while developing in notebooks. It is very simple but I always struggle to remember it and found it on google
%load_ext autoreload %autoreload 2 import os import sys module_path = os.path.abspath(os.path.join('../src')) # or the path to your source code sys.path.insert(0, module_path)
What does this do?
Basically, we have two parts.
The first one is the
autoreload module. This is an extension that is installed by default with Jupyter. It allows us (as its name suggests) to auto-reload the imported modules when there are any changes. Otherwise, you will need to restart the kernel.The second part is to add the path to your source code to your
PYTHONPATH so it can be imported. The easiest way to do this is to insert the math in with the sys.path.insert command. the 0 is the index to insert the path. We put it in the first place so it takes preference over anything else you might have installed.Bonus track - Add your environment variables
As a bonus track, I also like to add my environment variables in the notebooks themselves when I am debugging something. It is as easy as:
%env AWS_PROFILE=development
Of course, be careful and don't put any secrets in the code.
That's it!
This is a ritual setup that I always do when creating a new notebook. Maybe the next step is to automatize it...