Jupyter notebook template cells

Question

Is there a way to easily include template cells that run shell commands in a notebook. I have some setup scripts for notebooks on Google Collab that install dependencies etc. They are common to many notebooks any currently if I need to update the cell I have to do it in every notebook. Is it possible to create some kind of reference?

As an example the code below checks a list of dependencies and installs them if not available:

try:
    import importlib
    for name, path in DEPENDENCIES:
        importlib.import_module(name)
except (ImportError, ModuleNotFoundError):
    if 'google.colab' in str(get_ipython()):
        print('Running on CoLab')
        from google.colab import drive
        drive.mount('/content/drive')

        !mkdir -p ~/.access
        ...

Answer 1

You can create a function in a regular python module and import that python module in all the jupyter notebooks.