Real Time Collaboration

Warning

Real Time Collaboration is an experimental feature. Please back up any files that you edit with it.

From JupyterLab 3.1, file documents and notebooks have collaborative editing using the Yjs shared editing framework. Editors are not collaborative by default; to activate it, start JupyterLab with the --collaborative flag.

To share a document with other users, you can copy the URL and send it, or you can install a helpful extension called jupyterlab-link-share that might help to share the link including the token.

The new collaborative editing feature enables collaboration in real-time between multiple clients without user roles, when sharing the URL of a document to other users, they will have access to the same environment you are working on (they can write and execute the cells).

Moreover, you can see the cursors from other users with an anonymous username, a username that will disappear in a few seconds to make room for what is essential, the document’s content.

Something you need to be aware of is that not all editors in JupyterLab support sync. Additionally, opening the same underlying document using different editor types may result in a lack of synchronization. For example, on JupyterLab, you can open a Notebook using the Notebook editor or a plain text editor, the so-called Editor. Those editors are not synchronized because, under the hood, they use a different model to represent the document’s content, what we call DocumentModel. If you modify a Notebook with both editors simultaneously, JupyterLab will prompt a warning message indicating that the document’s content changed. For more information, you can read the section of Documents.