ASReview on Colab

With this simple tool, you can start an ASReview session on Google Colab.

The project files are stored in either your google drive or the user files found in the window to the left of the screen, depending on your settings. If saved to the user files, they can be accessed only as long as the runtime is live. If saved to your google drive, they will be saved permanently and can be accessed during a subsequent session.

How to use

To use this tool, you will need to follow the steps in the colab session. This will include the following steps:

1. Open the colab session with the button below.

2. Create an account on ngrok.

Navigate to ngrok.com and create an account. You do not have to install anything.

3. Find your ngrok authentication token.

To use ngrok, you will first you will need an authentication token. This can be found on ngrok.com/auth

4. Enter your ngrok authentication token in the colab session.

Copy the authentication code and fill in the NGROK_AUTH_TOKEN field in the colab session.

If you want to protect the session with a password, mark the set_password_access checkbox. The default username and password are asreview and colab. You can change these in the password_access field.

5. Run the colab session.

Finally, run all cells in the colab session. This will start ASReview. The key-combination for running all cells is Ctrl+F9.

You might need to allow access to your google drive if you want to save project files.

6. Open the ASReview session.

The ASReview session can be opened by clicking on the link in cell below Start ASReview. The output of this cell will look like this: Public URL: http://xx-xx-xx-xx.ngrok.io/

If prompted, click visit site.

if the ASReview session has been stopped, you can restart it by running the cells under Set up ASReview and Start ASReview again.

Project files

Colab blocks uploading project files. The way around this is to upload them directly to your google drive. To simplify this, you can use the cells at the end of the notebook titled Import ASReview files`. These cells will upload the files to your google drive and extract them, ready to use in asreview.

How it works

ASReview is run as a server you can access with your browser. Instead of running this server locally, we are using google colab, and connecting to their local url using ngrok via the pyngrok package. The notebook also mounts a drive session to store project files.

License

MIT License (see LICENSE file)