// the find
pbugnion/gmaps
Google maps for Jupyter notebooks
gmaps is a Jupyter widget that renders interactive Google Maps inside notebooks — heatmaps, choropleth GeoJSON layers, markers, directions, drawing tools. It's aimed at data scientists who want geographic visualization without leaving the notebook environment.
The layer model is clean and composable: you build a figure and stack layers (heatmap, symbol, GeoJSON, directions) independently, which makes it easy to combine data sources. GeoJSON choropleth support with per-feature color control is genuinely useful for country/region-level analysis. The bundled datasets and worked examples lower the barrier to getting something on screen quickly. There's real test coverage across both the Python layer-construction logic and the JS services.
It's effectively unmaintained — the last meaningful activity was years ago, the CI badge points to Travis which shut down for open source, and the install instructions still walk you through the old `nbextension enable` flow that breaks on modern JupyterLab. The hard dependency on a Google Maps API key is a real friction point: you need billing enabled and the right APIs whitelisted before a single map renders. ipyleaflet does nearly everything this does using OpenStreetMap and has stayed current with the Jupyter ecosystem, making gmaps hard to recommend for new work.