CoLab is Slack-like collaboration tool for scientists. This repository contains the original concept developed at the Hack24 hackathon, development of a full application is ongoing here: https://github.com/colab-chat/colab-server
Current key features:
- Persistent chat channels
- Rendered LaTeX equations
- Execution and editing of Python and R scripts
- Exporting chat history to Jupyter notebooks
The project started life as a hackathon entry to Hack24 for a challenge set by ELife. We made a YouTube video for the hackathon entry.
Improving usability is being worked on but the following instructions can be used to test the software in its current state.
Requires Python >3.5 and the packages listed in requirements.txt which can be installed with pip using
pip install -r requirements.txt
Username can be set here. An Apache Kafka and a Zookeeper server must be running. This is very straightforward and is documented here. The address of the Kafka broker must then be set here.
Then run run.py.
CoLab is implemented in Python using the Flask framework. Some javascript is used in the front-end.