Hi @yuvipanda (Sorry it’s taken me so long to play with this!)
This looks perfect for the case studies in the Turing Way! It seemed super fast to load too, which is great from a user perspective! Thank you for developing it 
What would the installation look like if I wanted something like this an autoscaling Kubernetes cluster?
Glad you like it, @sgibson91
This is currently optimized for running on a single node only. I think having it be the way you have running - with a binderhub installation limited to one repo only - is the easiest way to run this on an autoscaling Kubernetes cluster. A lot of the performance optimizations and simplifications we can do here you can’t in a distributed system like Kubernetes…
Ok that’s good to know. Though I guess at the moment, we’re not sure how popular the book is going to be! We could monitor this for a few months and see how many people are actually using the Binder links in the book (yet to come!). It may be more cost-effective for us to run a littlest BinderHub deployment if we’re not getting a lot of traffic to the autoscaling Hub.
Awesome 
Keep me posted.
@mathematicalmichael I’d love for you to take a look at the demo too, and see if this is what you had in mind.
I’m mostly trying to gauge interest in repo2dockerspawner so I can prioritize it appropriately.
Hey @yuvipanda thank you for pinging me! I hadn’t seen the updates to this thread yet!
@choldgraf mentioned a way to use regex (clarified by @sgibson91) to achieve a similar result with a fork of littlest-binderhub. I believe the use case they mention regarding the lack of resources on mybinder.org is most closely aligned to what I have in mind.
I checked out your link, (also thank you… I had never seen the ipython repo before! It’s so full of useful stuff), and was very happy with how quickly it loaded by comparison to the binder link on their github. I love the next step that @psychemedia asked about wherein a dropdown list is used (I implemented this once in a Jupyterhub so students could poke around and explore the differences between a few environments while maintaining access to the same persistent files).
(I use DockerSpawner and am fairly sure I pulled that code from something I saw @minrk post in an Issue regarding image_whitelist).
I think I understand what he mentioned about a solution that relies on re-building images (but that is something I would like to avoid doing manually. If I push to master, I expect the link to just be ready the next time someone visits, the same way binder does now). Problem is, nothing I do right now is popular enough to live in cache, so those load times are great to avoid!
I’m very much interested in helping others publish open source “textbooks” (sites) with interactive examples (like spacy mixed with jupyterbook or the various similar static-site alternatives), and simply want it to be the case that it is easy to set up to scale traffic, so I don’t have to worry about a server I rent going down.
So again, same use case as @sgibson91. If someone visits a link and an ephemeral container is created for them with only a single node but perhaps more memory, that’s already a good start. multi-node/ability to parallelize is much lower priority but firmly in the ‘would be nice’ column. I don’t quite understand the nuances of performance optimizations, but I can already tell that this is fairly close to what I have in mind. I have yet to set up anything on kubernetes that can scale, but from my understanding, using a binder with the whitelist seems to be an appropriate way to handle scaling the computational needs of an online course. I really appreciate your work on this (and more).
My other use-case for this is (building up towards those ambitions) building interactive demonstrations of my thesis work on my website. There, the problem isn’t so much resources as it is lag time for binder to start up. Which this project (and scaling with single-nodes in kube) … most certainly solves. Just to clarify, the link you provided is running on a single-node server and can handle multiple users at once?
@mathematicalmichael Not sure how relevant this is but I recently tried wrapping a Jupyter Book in an electron app shell and it seemed to work okay against a local kernel.
This provides the advantage of being able to distribute the static textbook elements in self serving, cross platform way (in principle at least; the current demo targets a build to Mac only), with ThebeLab making code executable against a kernel outside the electron app.
Three things that would make the demo more compelling:
Down the line, the ability to pack and run a kernel inside the app, and/or run notebook within the electron browser against a Pyodide kernel (I have no idea if the latter is event possible!)
very cool! that’s certainly an interesting approach, (perhaps thinking too far ahead here), but having the ability for a student to open up a website on an ipad and have their “textbook” be there is a real appeal. I know jupyterlab still isn’t quite up to par on that device, but lots of websites most certainly are (like https://jupyter.org/jupyter-book/intro.html). The thinking is that even a smartphone can suffice for self-teaching if the website is well-designed enough.
The electron app is neat but (I feel) the second you ask someone to download a thing, you add some immediate friction. For packaging a software solution for a client (something that’s been a struggle before on smaller projects with non-technical people), your solution is pretty perfect, and something I’m keeping on my radar.
Yes, the download step is a friction step, but it you want to read the text content (even if not execute the notebook code) in an offline setting, the electron app lets you do that without having to install and run a notebook server or find an HTTP server to serve the Jupyter Book (or maybe it works without an http server anywy? I haven’t checked.)
Using ThebeLab to launch a Binder kernel from the electron app / book also means that if you do have a network connection, you can execute the code from the app book without having to install a Jupyter server yourself.
Thinking about TLJH plugins… If I were an instructor, and packaged up course requirements as plugin, that’d give me an easy route to build and test my set up locally, then give it to a Faculty IT person (for example) to a customise a Faculty managed TLJH server.
But what if one of my students wanted to run the set up in their own, local, single user notebook environment? Could the plugin be used to set that up?
(I’ve often thought it might make sense to try to define course requirements as a Python package that contains nothing but a README and a set of package requirements; this would mean a student could install the required course environment using something like pip install myUni-py101).
This is really cool and definitely useful since it’s exactly what I’m trying to do.
I’m not exactly sure how to use repo2dockerspawner against a repo though. Could you please post an example?
In jupyterhub config:
c.JupyterHub.spawner_class = 'repo2dockerspawner.Repo2DockerSpawner'
c.Repo2DockerSpawner.repo = 'https://github.com/mistamun/pytudes'is there any update on this interesting thread?
I opened Building a "The Littlest BinderHub" to discuss work towards a ‘Littlest BinderHub’ (a full BinderHub instance on a single node), distinct from the ‘Littlest Binder’ (single node, here)
Using ThebeLab to launch a Binder kernel from the electron app / book also means that if you do have a network connection, you can execute the code from the app book without having to install a Jupyter server yourself.
the download step is a friction step, but it you want to read the text content in an offline setting, the electron app lets you do that without having to install and run a notebook server or find an HTTP server to serve the Jupyter Book .