Silly question perhaps, but how can my Python/Jupyter notebook check to see if it’s running on binder? I’d like to disable certain feature for that case.
Hmm maybe you could check the username? I think it’s jovyan
Thanks for the reply - yes, I did see that username, but I didn’t know if it was a “permanent” thing. But maybe my question was naive - once I build a Binder instance of my repo, does it remain unchanged until I explicitly re-build? Or do future commits to the repo auto-rebuild my Binder instance? Apologies for probably butchering terminology and for not RTFM.
That might not be true in all cases as I believe a few projects or docker-stacks containers all uses Jovyan as the default user.
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Yes and no. When you visit (say) Binder we figure out which commit master is currently pointing to and build that. So if master changes a visit to Binder will trigger a rebuild. If master hasn’t changed there won’t be a rebuild.
Right now master resolves to the commit fa84f12b0cd8062ca68ad4ffe1ba440b0bff5840 so visiting Binder or Binder will get you exactly the same build. However if you visit https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/binder-examples/requirements/a73ba121c9847fa38b7c4153230b9bfa9eecfaa7 you will get the build/state of the repo from February 2019.
You can also use a branch name or tag instead of a commit SHA. There are a few repositories that have a binder tag that they link to which they update once in a while when there is a “new version that is ready for users”.
“on binder” (and not specifically on mybinder):
$ grep Binder /etc/jupyter/templates/login.html
<h1>Binder inaccessible</h1>
I think most BinderHub deployments will end up having BINDER_SERVICE_HOST set as an environment variable. So I’d check for that.