Load Google Drive folder in Google Colab

There are several cases where:

• fetching stock prices is not possible through python libraries like yahoofinancials or other APIs
• you want to load the same data over and over again (for parallelization)
• you want to use you python modules without publishing them to a registry

In these cases I find it very handy to store my data (csv format) and my modules in google drive.

However, loading the data to Google Colab turned into pain since I had to manually upload the files each time I wanted to run a notebook.

To avoid this situation I mount google drive and:

1. add the folder with my python modules to the path
2. copy the data to the Colab data folder

import warnings
warnings.simplefilter('ignore')

%config InlineBackend.figure_formats=["png"]

from google.colab import drive
drive.mount('/content/drive', force_remount=True)

import os
import sys
import glob
from shutil import copytree, copy

# This will add my python modules in the path
gdrive_base_path = '/content/drive/My Drive/my-python-modules'
sys.path.append(gdrive_base_path)

try:
  # copy the data we need
  copytree('/content/drive/My Drive/Colab Notebooks/data', '/content/data')
except Exception as e:
  pass

%reload_ext autoreload
%autoreload 2
%matplotlib inline

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import scipy.stats as st

Since the folder that contain my python modules is now in the system path, I'm able to

import my_module

and whenever I change my modules (add more functionality, improvements), it practically saves it to Google Drive, since it is a pure mount.

When it comes to loading data, then I simply:

MSFT = pd.read_csv('data/msft_daily.csv', parse_dates=True, index_col=0, header=0)

Note: Since copytree is used, uploading new data files to Google Colab, will not automatically save it to Google Drive!