Workbench Setup

Starting Workbench for the first time

Choosing your environment


When you start your Workbench session you should see a dropdown box similar to the screenshot above. You will find the latest Descartes Labs Python client release version, alongside the 2 most recent releases, with and without a GPU. We recommend you use the latest version of the CPU-enabled environment (first option, selected by default) unless you have specific requirements otherwise. 

All environments will take a few minutes to spin up, GPU-enabled environments will take a little longer.

If you would like to change the Workbench environment after startup, simply click "File > Hub Control Panel" to stop and restart your VM to choose a different environment. 

Navigating Workbench

Once logged in, you will find by default a directory called example-notebooks. These are a series of public facing tutorial notebooks designed to get you acquainted with the basic access patterns as well as a number of demo spatiotemporal pipelines. You can always access the latest of these notebooks by navigating to https://github.com/descarteslabs/example-notebooks

Note! The example-notebooks directory gets re-cloned upon every Workbench server restart. You can add to and modify files on your Workbench environment, but be sure to not make any changes you want saved to the example-notebooks directory!

Authenticating in Workbench

Before running any Descartes Labs Python code, you must first authenticate. In the file manager, navigate into the example-notebooks folder and open the file guides/01 Logging In.ipynb. This Jupyter notebook will walk you through the steps to authenticate.

 

Troubleshooting

I can't log in to Workbench / I'm stuck in a login loop

You don't have access to Workbench. Contact support@descarteslabs.com if you believe you should have access.