DS2002 Data Science Systems

Course materials and documentation for DS2002

View the Project on GitHub ksiller/ds2002-course

Getting started with Environments

The goal of this activity is to familiarize you with GitHub Codespaces and your development environment. You’ll learn how to start and manage Codespaces instances and understand the basic workflow for completing labs and exercises.

Note: Go to your forked course repository and start Codespaces as described in the course’s general setup instructions. If you haven’t forked the repo yet, do it now.

In-class Activities

We will work together on completing Lab 00 - Setup. This activity will introduce you to GitHub Codespaces and familiarize you with the process of submitting your lab and project work to Canvas.

Continue with the Additional Practice activities below to deepen your understanding of the Codespaces environment.

Additional Practice

  1. Explore the VS Code interface: Familiarize yourself with the VS Code interface in your Codespace.
    • In the Explorer panel on the left, note the folders and files of the course repository (as they exist in your copy).
    • At the bottom is the Terminal window. We will use it to explore Linux commands in next week’s class.
  2. Create another Codespace instance:
    • Go to your forked repository on GitHub (https://github.com/YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/ds2002-course)
    • Click the green Code button
    • Select the Codespaces tab
    • Click Create codespace on main (or select a different branch)
    • Notice that you can have multiple Codespaces running simultaneously, each with its own environment
    • Compare the two instances to see how they operate independently
  3. View and manage your active Codespaces:
    • Go to https://github.com/codespaces to see a list of all your active Codespaces
    • You can see details about each Codespace including:
      • The repository it’s connected to
      • When it was created
      • How long it’s been running
      • The machine type and compute resources
    • Try stopping one of your Codespaces and restarting it to see how the state is preserved
    • Explore the settings to understand resource limits and billing (if applicable)

Troubleshooting

Clipboard in VSCode

If you see a popup asking for clipboard access, you can learn more about it here:

How do I allow VS Code to access my clipboard for reading?

Resources