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Digital Earth Africa Notebooks wiki

Home (this page)
- Get started with the Digital Earth Africa Sandbox notebook repository by reading the information on this page
Guide to working within your own Git repository on the Sandbox
- Step-by-step instructions on how to set up your own git repository in the DE Africa Sandbox. This is useful for version control and for collaborating with others
Guide to working with your own copy of the DE Africa Notebooks
- Step-by-step instructions on how to set up git with the DE Africa notebooks repository. This is useful for version control when making your own changes to notebooks, and if you are contributing back to the repository (see Advanced: contributing back below)
Submitting a Use Case Request
- Instructions and a template for submitting a use case proposal to the DE Africa team. Specific, detailed proposals that follow the template are most likely to be fulfilled faster
List of Documentation Keywords
- A glossary of keywords used in the DE Africa Sandbox Notebooks. It can be used as reference, or as a keyword suggestion guide when creating new notebooks
Test changes on the DE Africa Sandbox Notebooks repository with Pytest
- Step-by-step instructions on running a simple Pytest command in the Sandbox to check the integrity of the repository following major changes.

To see what data is available, use:
- DE Africa Explorer for browsing the data that is available within DE Africa's Sandbox environment
Explore DE Africa products on DE Africa Maps
- "Explore data" > "Analysis Ready Data > Surface Reflectance and Radar Backscatter"
- "Explore data" > "Derived Data > Water and Vegetation"
- "Explore data" > "Ancillary Data > Digital Elevation Models"
Join the Open Data Cube slack. This is a friendly and active community of Open Data Cube users who are always happy to help answer any questions about DE Africa, Open Data Cube, xarray and Python!

Sign up to the DE Africa Sandbox JupyterLab environment using your email and log in. This may take ~5 minutes if this is the first time signing in to the Sandbox.
Once you are logged in to the Sandbox, you will be presented with a selection of ready-made Jupyter notebooks in the Sandbox's built-in file browser which will walk you through getting started with DE Africa. Browse to find a notebook you want to run (e.g. beginners_guide/01_Jupyter_notebooks.ipynb and double-click to launch it.
Please note that ready-made notebooks are regularly overwritten. To make and keep changes to an existing notebook, save a copy of that notebook with the following steps: right-click the notebook and select "duplicate" (this will make a copy), then right-click the copy and select "rename", providing a new name for the copied notebook. Then work with the copied notebook, which will prevent changes from being overwritten.
To start writing your own notebooks or contribute back to the repository using git, follow one of the options in Advanced: contributing back.

The previous steps allow you to load and run existing notebooks. To be able to write your own analyses and contribute back to the deafrica-sandbox-notebooks repository, follow this guide to get started with git:
- DE Africa notebooks using git: Git is a version-control software designed to help track changes to files and collaborate with multiple users on a project. Using git is the recommended workflow for working with deafrica-sandbox-notebooks as it makes it easy to stay up to date with the latest versions of functions and code, and makes it impossible to lose your work.
When writing notebooks for your own analyses, copy and rename the DE Africa Notebooks template notebook. This template has been developed to make it easier to create new notebooks that meet all pull request checklist requirements. The template notebook contains a simple structure and useful general advice on writing and formatting Jupyter notebooks.
When you're happy with the notebook, push it to Github and create a pull request.