Tip: speed up Binder launches by pulling github content in a Binder link with nbgitpuller

Binder discuss
20

Pondering this a bit more eg in context of this repo which is gitpulled into this Binder build (discussion), I wonder…

Github conventionally uses the gh-pages branch as a “reserved” branch for constructing Github Pages docs related to a particular repo.

The binder/ directory in a repo can be used to partition Binder build requirements in a repo, but there are a couple of problems associated with this:

  • a maintainer may not want to have the binder/ directory cluttering their package repo;
  • any updates to the repo will force a rebuild of the Binder image next time the repo is run on a particular Binder node. (With Binder federation, if there are N hosts in the federation, after updating a repo, is it possible that my next N attempts to run the repo on MyBinder may require a rebuild if I am directed to a different host each time?)

If by convention something like a binder-build branch was used to contain the build requirements for a repo, then the process for calling a build (by default) could be simplified.

Eg rather than having something like:

https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/colinleach/binder-box/master/?urlpath=git-pull?repo=https://github.com/colinleach/astro-Jupyter

we would have something like:

https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/colinleach/astro-Jupyter/binder-build/?urlpath=git-pull?repo=https://github.com/colinleach/astro-Jupyter

which could simplify to something that defaults to a build from binder-build branch (the “build” branch) and nbgitpull from master (the “content” branch):

https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/colinleach/astro-Jupyter?binder-build=True

Complications could be added to support changing the build branch, the nbgitpull branch, the commit/ID of a particular build, etc?

It might overly complicate things further, but I could also imagine:

  • automatically injecting nbgitpuller into the Binder image and enabling it;
  • providing some sort of directive support so that if the content directory has a setup.py file the package from that content directory is installed.
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