The "mybinder.org, deconstructed" guide

Binder discuss
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Is this a question of discovering the right configuration file that let’s you solve your problem (“I need to set environment variables when this container starts, how do I do that?”)? Or a question of getting all the right packages to play nicely together? Or a third thing?

I think this is at least a two step problem:

  1. how do I launch and configure a VM on cloud hoster X so that it has a docker daemon I can
    use
  2. how do I connect to the running notebook/RStudio session on that remote VM from my local computer

Is there a third angle to this? I think we could start to address this with a “Howto” style guide in the documentation. My feeling is that we should find existing tools/guides for question 1 as we can’t maintain docs for all the various cloud hosters ourselves. For question 2 I think the answer is generic so we can add it to the FAQ and a Howto guide. What do you think?

Maybe we should break this thread out into a new topic: “The hard things about using repo2docker” or some such?

2

Yeah, I think separate app is definitely the way to go. In the same way that mybinder.org is a web service built on repo2docker’s cli, this would be a local gui app built on repo2docker, consuming its api (could be via cli or python).

When dealing with ephemeral cloud resources, pushing to a private registry is probably sensible to include, so you can build once and run several times. I’d almost call this a “mybinder.org, deconstructed” guide. It’s everything Binder does, but taken as more manual steps on your own terms:

  1. request cloud resources
  2. build image with repo2docker (requires installing docker)
  3. store image in a registry for future use (requires registry credentials; docker login being the easiest)
  4. launch a container from the image
  5. connect to the running notebook (might require cloud firewall configuration)
1 Like
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(we are now in a new topic, mostly because I wanted to experiment with the feature. Let’s see if this was a good idea or not.)

4

What is the status, support and adoption like for docker-machine these days? It seems like it could be a good way to get a machine that runs dockerd in the cloud and run containers on it.

https://docs.docker.com/machine/get-started-cloud/ tells me that I should be looking at “docker cloud” but all I see when I follow the link is my private docker hub registry :-/