I haven’t written any magics for Ipython before (and it probably shows!) but I started sketching out some magic for the Contentmine command-line container I described in Using Docker as a Personal Productivity Tool Running Command Line Apps Bundled in Docker Containers ,
What I’d like to explore is a more general way of calling command line functions accessed from arbitrary containers via a piece of generic magic, but I need to learn a few things along the way, such as handling arguments for a start!
The current approach provides crude magic for calling the contentmine functions included in a public contentmine container from a Jupyter notebook running inside a container. The commandline contentmine container is started from within the notebook contained and uses a volume-from the notebook container to pass files between the containers. The path to the directory mounted from the notebook is identified by a bit of jiggery pokery , as is the method for spotting what container the notebook is actually running in (I’m all ears if you know of a better way of doing either of these things?:-)
The magic has the form:
%getpapers /notebooks rhinocerous
to run the getpapers query (with fixed switch settings for now) and the search term rhinocerous ; files are shared back from the contentmine container into the .notebooks folder of the Jupyter container.
Other functions include:
%norma /notebooks rhinocerous%cmine /notebooks rhinocerous
These functions are applied to files in the same folder as was created by the search term ( rhinocerous ).
The magic needs updating so that it will also work in a Jupyter notebook that is not running within a container this should simply be just of case of switching in a different directory path. The magics also need tweaking so we can pass parameters in. I’m not sure if more flexibility should also be allowed on specifying the path (we need to make sure that the paths for the mounted directories are the correct ones!)
What I’d like to work towards is some sort of line magic along the lines of:
%docker psychemedia/contentmine -mountdir /CALLING_CONTAINER_PATH -v ${MOUNTDIR}:/PATH COMMAND -ARGS etc
or cell magic:
%%docker psychemedia/contentmine -mountdir /CALLING_CONTAINER_PATH -v ${MOUNTDIR}:/PATHCOMMAND -ARGS etc
...
COMMAND -ARGS etc
Note that these go against the docker command line syntax should they be closer to it?
The code, and a walked through demo, are included in the notebook available via this gist , which should also be embedded below.