install_from_local()?

[gabegomes]

Thanks for creating condacolab! I was wondering if you thought about the possibility of installing from a local .sh file that one could keep in their Google Drive. That way there would be no need for downloading from another location. That would be cool for some of the things I'm planning to use in a class I'll be teaching in the Spring. Cheers!

[jaimergp]

Hi! Thanks for the kind words!

I think you might be able to fool the download code path by prepending file:// to the actual path. Maybe not. We can add this, but there's no such thing as "local" in Colab. Everything is a download if it wasn't present in their image already. If you do want to try in a fork and get some timings, this is the part that needs to be modified.

If you want to cache stuff, I usually recommend creating a constructor-based installer. Instructions were added to the README here. I upload mine to GitHub releases in a separate repo and the downloads are as fast as they get.

[NightMachinery]

@jaimergp The local install is useful with Google Drive.

[jaimergp]

It might be interesting for private installers that cannot be made available publicly. It can be done!