Encountering resource limits (?) when building Binder from repo (returned a non-zero code: 137)

Binder
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Hello, maintainer of Parcels here. We use Binder, but have been encountering the following uninformative error after trying to launch binder during step 39 of repo2docker:

The command '/bin/sh -c TIMEFORMAT='time: %3R' bash -c 'time ${MAMBA_EXE} env update -p ${NB_PYTHON_PREFIX} --file ".binder/environment.yml" && time ${MAMBA_EXE} clean --all -f -y && ${MAMBA_EXE} list -p ${NB_PYTHON_PREFIX} '' returned a non-zero code: 137

I was able to successfully build locally using repo2docker so I’m quite sure it isn’t an error on our end. My only thoughts is its a resource limitation imposed by binder.org. We also aren’t the only ones encountering this problem, see this open issue related to jupyterlab/jupyterlab-demo.

Does anyone have a suggested work around? Binder is super practical for our users to get introduced to our software. I saw some unrelated mention of repo2docker GitHub Actions, perhaps that could help - but I don’t know where that fits into the grand scheme of things.

Links:

  • https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/OceanParcels/parcels/master?labpath=docs%2Fexamples%2Fparcels_tutorial.ipynb
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I believe the problem is that you no longer should have defaults in the environment.yml for a channel, following the example for Conda environment with environment.yml.
I just made a fork of the Parcels repo and made that change. Not only does it get past that step and launch a session, the parcels_tutorial.ipynb notebook that comes up at launch runs all code cells successfully. Fork is here. Try to launch directly by clicking here.
Plus, I had set up an unrelated one using that as a template recently and it worked here.

The JupyterLab sample repo listed on the sample repos page in the Binder documentation uses requirements.txt and not environment.yml. The one I reference above is for use of environment.yml.

The one you reference hasn’t been touched by a human in over a year and perhaps more importantly, is not the one the Binder folks offer as a guide.

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