Welcome to Labnote’s documentation!¶
Overview¶
Labnote is a flexible and lightweight tool for generating HTML-based electronic lab notebooks.
Rather than attempting to provide a unified tool for creating and sharing lab notebook entries, Labnote simply ties together existing documents and analyses outputs and builds and creates an HTML index of these resources.
In short, it helps you go from something like this:
├── animal_behavior
│ └── molothrus
│ └── README.html
├── barnacles
│ ├── cirripede-morphology
│ │ └── README.html
│ └── cirripede-taxonomy
│ └── README.html
└── finches
├── finch-beak-size-comparison
│ └── beak_size.py
├── finch-foraging-strategies
│ └── foraging-strategies.py
└── natural-selection
└── thoughts.txt
To something like this:
Labnote works by scanning a set of one or more directories for files matching a pattern that you specify as pertaining to notebook entries (e.g. a single log, script, or document describing some particular project or analysis.) It then constructs an HTML table of contents pointing to each of the matching files. By default, results are sorted by last-modified date. Categories can be defined and used to separate entries relating to different topics.
In order to support as many different work styles as possible, labnote tries and make as few assumptions as possible about how your files are organized, and provides configuration options allowing for a wide range of directory structures and file types.
Finally, labnote is designed to be extensible. While currently there is only a single no-frills theme, the jinga2 templating system used by Labnote makes it trivial to create themes.