Today, we are incredibly excited to announce the launch of the new Google Colab extension for Visual Studio Code. This work is the culmination of two key trends that have become apparent in the last few years.
First, VS Code is one of the world’s most popular and beloved code editors. Its success is no mystery – VS Code is fast, lightweight, and infinitely adaptable.
Second, Colab has become the go-to platform for millions of AI/ML developers, students, and researchers, across the world. Colab makes it simple to write and execute code, collaborate with others, and get seamless access to powerful compute resources like GPUs and TPUs.
Until now, these two worlds have been mostly separate. Users had customized VS Code environments for project development, and web-based Colab environments for notebook execution, visualization, and training/inference workloads.
We’ve seen the passion from the community to bridge the gap between powerful VS Code development and web-based Colab notebooks through blog posts, forum threads, and popular GitHub repositories detailing workarounds. All of this made it clear that Colab users want the power and simplicity of Colab inside the VS Code editor they are already using.
Our objective at Colab is to meet developers, students, and researchers where they are, and for many of them, that’s in VS Code. That’s why we’re now releasing the official Colab VS Code extension.
🤝 The Best of Both Worlds
The new Colab VS Code extension combines the strengths of both platforms:
- For VS Code Users: Continue to use the editor you’re familiar with. Connect local notebooks to high-powered Colab runtimes, including Pro-tier runtimes with premium GPUs and TPUs.
- For Colab Users: This integration is designed to support the workflows many Colab users already have. It’s common to work on notebooks that are part of a larger project or Git repository. A subset of Colab users want more powerful IDE features with increased extensibility. This extension bridges the gap between simple to provision Colab runtimes and the prolific VS Code editor.
🚀 Getting Started with the Colab Extension
You can get up and running in just a few clicks.
1. Install the Colab Extension
- In VS Code, open the Extensions view from the Activity Bar on the left (or press
[Ctrl|Cmd]+Shift+X). - Search the marketplace for Google Colab.
- Click Install on the official Colab extension.
- (If prompted, install the required extension dependency – Jupyter)
2. Connect to a Colab Runtime
- Create or open any .ipynb notebook file in your local workspace.
- Either run a cell (which drops you into kernel selection) or click the Select Kernel button in the top right.
- Click Colab and then select your desired runtime, sign in with your Google account, and you’re all set!
Your local notebook is now powered by a Colab runtime!
For VS Code derivatives the extension is also published to Open VSX.
What‘s Next
This project is a launchpad for bringing the best of Google Colab’s functionality to users everywhere, and we’re just getting started. We plan to bring even more Colab goodness to VS Code.
We are thrilled to finally bring these two platforms together. Download the extension from the VS Code Marketplace today, give it a try, and let us know what you think on:
Happy coding!
