xcengine: turn Jupyter notebooks into Application Packages

xcengine provides tools to convert a Jupyter notebook into one of several parameterized, headlessly runnable forms:

• A Python script
• A Docker container image
• An OGC Earth Observation Application Package

Defining parameters in a notebook

xcengine uses the same convention as papermill for defining parameters in a notebook. All parameters should be set as Python variables in the same notebook code cell, and that cell should be designated as the parameter cell by giving it the tag parameters. In JupyterLab, you can do this using the property inspector (⚙⚙ icon in the right sidebar). See the papermill documentation for more details.

During conversion, xcetool will detect any variables that are set in the parameters cell and make them available as command-line parameters for the output script and container, and as workflow parameters for the application package.

xcetool usage

xcengine provides a command-line tool called xcetool, which has several subcommands for different functions. Use the --help option with these subcommands to get more details on usage.

xcetool make-script

Convert a Jupyter notebook to a non-interactive Python script.

xcetool image build

Convert a Jupyter notebook to a Docker container image. This subcommand can additionally produce a Common Workflow Language (CWL) file defining an OGC Earth Observation Application Package which uses the container image.

xcetool image run

Run a Docker container using an image converted from a Jupyter notebook.