Binder Documentation

Binder allows you to create custom computing environments that can be shared and used by many remote users. It is powered by BinderHub, which is an open-source tool that deploys the Binder service in the cloud. One-such deployment lives here, at mybinder.org, and is free to use. For more information about the mybinder.org deployment and the team that runs it, see About mybinder.org.

This documentation provides information for those who wish to use a pre-existing BinderHub deployment such as mybinder.org. If you’d like documentation on how to create and administer your own BinderHub deployment, see the BinderHub documentation, which guides you through deploying your own BinderHub.

See the Binder Examples GitHub organization for sample Binder repositories demonstrating its functionality.

Note

Binder is a research pilot, whose main goal is to understand usage patterns and workloads for future evolution and development. It is not a service that can be relied on for critical operations.

Using Binder

The following sections cover the basics of how to use a Binder service.

Getting started with Binder

• Getting started with Binder
  • An interactive introduction to Binder
  • What can I do with Binder?
  • Generating a sharable Binder link
  • What technology does Binder use?
• Using Binder
  • Preparing a repository for Binder
  • Launching your Binder
  • Use cases

How to...

• Choose languages for your environment
• Configure the user interface
• Generate custom launch badges for your Binder

Tutorials and in-depth guides

• Ensure reproducibility for your Binder
  • Pin dependencies
  • Using Dockerfiles
• Use a Dockerfile for your Binder
  • When should you use a Dockerfile?
  • Preparing your Dockerfile
  • Ensuring reproducibility with Dockerfiles

Sample repositories and configuration

The following is a list of sample repositories showing off various things you can do with Binder.

Sample repositories and configuration

• Interesting Binder repositories from around the web
• The Binder demo repositories
• Configuration Files

Advanced usage

These pages cover more advanced topics in the Binder ecosystem, as well as resources for more information.

• mybinder.org Usage Guidelines
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Status of mybinder.org
• About mybinder.org
• mybinder.org status and reliability
• More information about Binder

Citing Binder

If you publish work that uses Binder, please consider citing the Binder paper from the 2018 SciPy proceedings!

Here is a citation that you can use:

Jupyter et al., "Binder 2.0 - Reproducible, Interactive, Sharable
Environments for Science at Scale." Proceedings of the 17th Python
in Science Conference. 2018. 10.25080/Majora-4af1f417-011