Written by Matt Bilyeu
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Running an existing project on Google Colab

In the Deep Learning course I’m taking, I was describing how to run one of our projects on Google Colaboratory, when another student mentioned they’d been using Colab for over a year and didn’t know some of this information. I’m sharing it here in a short post to help others get up and running quickly and effectively with Colab.

Scenario: You have an existing IPython / Jupyter notebook with a directory of additional modules, and you’d like to run the project on Google Colaboratory (Colab).

Here’s how to do it.

  1. Upload project directory to Google Drive
  2. Navigate to notebook file, right-click and select “Open with” > “Google Colaboratory” to open the notebook
    • If it’s your first time using Colab, you may need to search for it in the Google Workspace Marketplace
  3. If you want to use a hardware accelerator like GPU or TPU, go to “Edit” > “Notebook settings” and change the device
  4. Open the “Files” pane via the left-hand nav bar
  5. From there, select “Mount Drive” to connect to Google Drive. Follow the instructions and go through the auth flow.
  6. Install any additional packages you need by executing !pip install <the requirements>
    • Code cells beginning with an exclamation point will be executed as shell commands, e.g. !ls
  7. Use the IPython magic command %cd to change the working directory to your project’s directory, e.g. %cd drive/MyDrive/path/to/project
    • This will make it so the notebook uses the correct working direcotry when loading imports from other files and directories in your project
  8. You should now be able to load modules and run the rest of your notebook cells
    • If you need to make changes to source files outside the notebook, you can (a) change them locally and re-upload them to drive or (b) open the files via the Colab Files section, and edit/save them directly. When edited outside of Colab, as in (a), you will need to restart the runtime or use importlib.reload. I’ve read that the %autoreload magic can work here, too, but I haven’t tried it.

google colab interface