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Use GitHub Codespaces

GitHub Codespaces is a development environment that’s hosted in the cloud.

The easiest way to get started is to fork the Planetary Computer Examples repository and create a new Codespace (we recommend setting a default region first).

Start codespaces from the "Code" dropdown.

This will create a Codespace under your GitHub account that’s configured to work well with our data.

A preview of GitHub Codespaces in the browser.

When you launch a notebook, you’ll be prompted to select a kernel. Choose the 'notebook': conda kernel.

Set a default region

We recommend that you create your Codespaces in the West Europe region. You can do this per-Codespace, or set a default region.

Set the default region

This ensures that your compute node is in the same Azure region as the data, giving the highest performance when accessing data from the Planetary Computer catalog.

Use Planetary Computer environments

Your Codespace uses a dev container to provide all the software and tools needed to do your data analysis and software development.

We publish our environments, which contain many packages useful for geospatial data analysis, at https://github.com/microsoft/planetary-computer-containers. These can be used in the Codespaces configuration for your project to ensure you have access to those packages.