Exporting projects

In Watson Studio you can share a project with others by exporting the project. Exporting a project packs the project assets that you select into a single file that can be shared like any other file. You can export a project as a ZIP file to your desktop or to a Git repository. You can only use an exported project to create a new project in Watson Studio. See Importing a project.

To export a project:

1. Open the project you want to export.
2. Check whether the assets that you include in your export, for example notebooks or connections, don’t contain credentials or other sensitive information that you don’t want to share. You should remove or hide this information before you begin the export. See Hiding sensitive code cells in a notebook.Personal credentials in a connection are removed; shared credentials in a connection are included in the exported file.
3. Before you can export to a Git repository, you must enable access to this GIT repository. Initially, the URL must point to a clean repository; thereafter, you can push incremental backups of the project to the same repository. If you want to change the another Git repository, you must relink to a new, clean repository.
4. Click from the project toolbar. Select to export the project to desktop or to a Git repository.

5. Select the assets to add. If you don’t want to manually select all of the assets of a type, you can filter by asset type.

   Alternatively, you can customize the project export settings by selecting preferences (the settings icon to the right of the window title) which are applied each time you export the project.

   Currently, you can export the following asset types: data assets, connections, connected data, folder assets, notebooks, Data Refinery flows and environment definitions.

   Be mindful when selecting assets to also include the dependencies of those assets, for example the data assets or connections for a data flow, a notebook, or connected data. There is no check for dependencies.

6. Optional: Change the name of the project export file.

7. Click Export. Do not leave the page while the export is running.

   When you export to desktop, the file is saved to the Downloads folder by default. If a ZIP file with the same name already exists, the existing file isn’t overwritten. When you export to a Git repository, you can push incremental changes to the repository.

   Ensure that your browser settings download the ZIP file to the desktop as a .zip file and not as a folder. Compressing this folder to enable project import leads to an error. Also note that you cannot manually add other assets to an exported project ZIP file on your desktop or to the project in a Git repository.

   The status of a project export is tracked on the project’s Overview page.
   Currently, you can only import projects that are exported from the same Watson Studio edition. For example, you cannot import a project in Watson Studio Local that was exported from Watson Studio Cloud.