Colab Autorun and Connect

Automatically connect, reconnect and optionally run the first cell of notebooks in Google Colab

Copyright © 2020 Teal Dulcet and Daniel Connelly

Firefox and Chromium add-on/WebExtension to automatically connect, reconnect and optionally run the first cell of notebooks in Google's Colaboratory (Colab) service. Useful when running Distributed Computing projects in Colab.

• Automatically connects to notebooks
• Automatically reconnects to notebooks
• Optionally automatically runs the first cell
• Desktop notifications when the notebooks change state
• Optionally rotate through Colab tabs when the system is idle or locked *
• Page action popup with the notebooks status and a stopwatch
• Use a keyboard shortcut to quickly open the popup (by default Ctrl+Alt+C)
• Detailed information output to the console
• Supports the light/dark mode of your system automatically
• Settings automatically synced between all browser instances and devices
• Follows the Firefox Photon Design
• Compatible with Firefox for Android

❤️ Please visit tealdulcet.com to support this extension and my other software development.

* Tab rotate does not currently work well with Firefox on Windows because of Bug 1615885.

Download

• Addons.mozilla.org (AMO)

Install from source

Clone the repository:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/tdulcet/Colab-Autorun-and-Connect.git

Firefox

Follow these instructions to install it in Firefox

Chromium/Chrome

1. Download the webextension-polyfill (specifically download the browser-polyfill.js file from here)
2. Rename the chromemanifest.json file to manifest.json
3. Follow these instructions to install it in Chromium/Chrome

Other Colab Extensions

• Colab Auto Reconnect (Firefox and Chrome)
• Colab Alive (Chrome)
• Colab Auto Reconnect (Chrome)

Contributing

Pull requests welcome! Ideas for contributions:

• Convert to Manifest V3 (MV3)
• Refactor into more modules
• Add option to run all cells, not just the first
• Workaround the issue with Colab popups hanging
• Support when the Colab interface is not in English
• Improve the performance
• Allow installing in Firefox for Android from AMO (see here and bug 1796184) and sync settings (see bug 1625257)
• Localize the add-on

Thanks to Daniel Connelly for the idea for this extension and for helping test it!