Retrieving files from remote IPython notebook server?

Question

If I don't want to give out SSH access to users of my remote IPython notebook server. Is there a way to let users browse non .ipynb files and download them?

Answer 1

You can use FileLink and FileLinks that are built-in:

from IPython.display import FileLink, FileLinks FileLinks('.') #lists all downloadable files on server 

The code above generates:

./ some_python_file.py some_xml_file.xml some_ipynb_file.ipynb 

The three items above are links that you can click to download.

Click here for an example from ipython.org

Answer 2

Unfortunately due to edge case reasons, FileLink doesn't work for files outside the Jupyter directory. You can however get around this by creating a link to the file first:

os.symlink( file_name, "tmp.txt" ) display( FileLink( "tmp.txt" ) ) 

In reality the workaround above leaves the link on disk. It also assumes everything has a "txt" extension. We probably want to clean up previous links to avoid cluttering the directory, and not rename the downloaded file. Here is a solution that persists only one link at at time and retains the base name:

def download_file( file_name : str ) -> None:     import os     from IPython.display import display, FileLink          base_name : str = os.path.basename( file_name )     k_info_file : str = ".download_file_info.txt"          # Remove previous link     if os.path.isfile( k_info_file ):         with open( k_info_file, "r" ) as fin:             previous_file = fin.read()                  if os.path.isfile( previous_file ):             print( "Removing previous file link." )             os.remove( previous_file )          # Remember current link     with open( k_info_file, "w" ) as fout:         fout.write( base_name )          # Create the link     assert not os.path.isfile( base_name ), "Name in use."     os.symlink( file_name, base_name )          # Return the link     display( FileLink( base_name ) )