Opening a file from an external URL

Warning

The third-party extension mentioned in this guide is not included in JupyterLite by default. There might be other JupyterLab extensions achieving the same behavior, that you might want to consider. This guide is provided as a reference and for convenience to show how you can enable such feature in your JupyterLite site.

By default in JupyterLite it is not possible to open a file from an external URL.

However you can install the jupyterlab-open-url-parameter extension to enable this feature.

In your build environment, install the extension:

pip install jupyterlab-open-url-parameter

Then build your JupyterLite site as usual:

jupyter lite build

The extension should be automatically enabled in your site.

The extension will open a file passed via a URL parameter. The URL parameter is fromURL. It is possible to pass multiple files via the fromURL parameter. The files will be opened in the order they are passed.

For example if you would like to open a notebook and a csv file:

• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab-demo/master/notebooks/Lorenz.ipynb

• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab-demo/master/data/iris.csv

You can append the following to the URL of your JupyterLab instance: ?fromURL=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab-demo/master/notebooks/Lorenz.ipynb&fromURL=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab-demo/master/data/iris.csv

Which will result in the following URL:

http://your-jupyterlite.example.com/lab?fromURL=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab-demo/master/data/iris.csv&fromURL=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab-demo/master/notebooks/Lorenz.ipynb

Note

For more information about the extension, check out the jupyterlab-open-url-parameter repository.

References

Check out the guide for adding extensions to learn more about how to add extensions to your JupyterLite site.