Collaborate on RenkuLab

Beyond building and maintaining your own data science workflows, there are many ways to use Renku to share your project with collaborators.

Find & access public projects

To find and access projects on Renku that you might want to interact with, you can click the Projects link in the menu bar followed by the Search tab. Without entering any search terms, you will see a list of all projects that you have access to. You can click on a project name to be taken to the project’s landing page.

By default, the files in projects created by other people are “read only” to you. This means you can see an overview, create and read issues, and browse the filesystem in both text and Provenance of results modes. The project’s Sessions tab will inform you that you do not have permissions to launch a notebook or make modifications to the code or datasets.

If you would like to interact with the notebooks (run, edit, upload data, continue your own analyses, etc.), you can fork the project, which creates your own copy of the current state of the repo.

If you have questions, notes, or discussion topics that you would communicate to the project’s owner(s), you can make issues

If you are part of the team and want to work on this project, you can ask the project creator to add you as a developer or maintainer of the project through GitLab.

Fork a project and take it in your own direction

Forking someone else’s project on Renku is just like forking any version-controlled project. Renku provides you a fork button on the project’s home page that creates a fork of the project (with the same name) under your own namespace, where you have permissions to launch notebooks and make settings modifications.

One reason you might want to fork someone’s project is to use it as a template for your own analysis.

Add collaborators to the conversation through Issues

In Renku, issues are media-rich discussions you can use to help keep track of your work and to collaborate with others. To find out more about them and walk through sample usage, see Share your results and collaborate with your peers.

Add or be added as a developer on a project

To allow someone to make changes to your project, you can use the GitLab interface to add them in Settings > Members, with at either Developer or Maintainer privileges.

Adding them here will make this project appear in their Your Projects list on Renku, where the Sessions tab for the project will allow them to launch a session to work on the project as usual.

Warning

Note that with multi-person projects it’s best for each person to make their changes in separate branches that you can later merge. For more information on how to branch and merge effectively, consult the git documentation.