Thank you so much for detailing all of this. It’s a really interesting perspective.
As you say, a ZIP is likely to be meaningful to your students (who might not know git). Even if some students are using JupyterHub, it could be reassuring for them to see that they are starting with the same ZIP URL as everyone else, just feeding the URL into a Binder process instead of exploring manually on their laptop.
I’m sure you’ve digested our input from the technical detail side of Repo2DockerSpawner etc, but to summarise my thoughts:
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To use ZIP URL as a source would require repo2docker to be updated to accept this in the first place.
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Repo2DockerSpawner would (probably) need minor UI adjustments to support this.
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You would need Stud.IP to reliably return etags so that it can use a cached Docker image when more students come with the same URL. Furthermore, and probably a bigger issue, you would need Stud.IP to allow your JupyterHub to have direct unauthenticated access to the URL. That would probably mean having it open to the wider internet, unless everything can be behind a private network or similar.
If Stud.IP is anything like Dropbox, for example, the URL the user clicks to see the ZIP file on the Stud.IP UI will not be usable directly to Repo2DockerSpawner - it is an HTML page not the ZIP itself. If there is an alternate URL direct to the ZIP, does it need to check for authentication cookies.
If it needs to be authenticated, maybe there is a way to supply credentials (or a different ‘share’ URL) to Repo2DockerSpawner’s UI, but that would need a much bigger change in Repo2DockerSpawner as well as Repo2Docker… As would allowing the ZIP file to be downloading manually from Stud.IP and then manually uploaded to Repo2DockerSpawner in JupyterHub (pretty cumbersome on a tablet anyway).
So I think a lot of this comes down to the precise behavior of Stud.IP and how your network is configured.
All of the above requires someone to make some code changes to repo2docker etc.
In my view, the immediately-available workaround is for you to build the images yourself and add to the list of images in DockerSpawner - if that’s what you’re using in JupyterHub. You could actually give the ZIP name as the ‘friendly name’ that users see for the image anyway, so they know exactly what they are selecting in relation to the ZIP files shared with all students. Other spawners may not have the same functionality, perhaps allowing only one named image to be available at any time (KubeSpawner, I think).
Sorry again if this is telling you everything you already know! Please keep us updated.
Dan