Common use-cases

This page describes some common patterns and use-cases for Binder. If you’re new to Binder, we recommend checking out Get started with Binder for an introduction to Binder, repository structure, and how to build your own repository.

For a more complete list of sample repositories for use with Binder, see the Sample Binder Repositories page.

Creating live demonstrations

Binder is useful if you want to interactively demonstrate something to a group of people, and would like them to immediately interact with the material as well.

There are several tools that make it easy to show off computational ideas and narratives. For example, you can build a Binder that is powered by Jupyter Notebooks, or turn them into an interactive presentation with RISE.

If you’re using Binder for a presentation, demo, or tutorial, just make sure that you’ve built the latest version of your Binder repository before you share a link with your audience to ensure that the build process has completed.

Share computational work or papers

Another common use for Binder is to use Binder to quickly show off your data science work. For example, if you’d like to share some analyses and visualizations on a dataset of interest. In this case, it is common to “prepare” your Binder repository for the analysis. For example, by downloading and modifying some data.

Binder allows you to run an arbitrary script after the environment has been installed. This is accomplished with a postBuild file. It will be run from the shell.

The Docker image for the repository will be run after the postBuild script has finished, meaning that the state of the repository will be baked into the image itself. Be careful - this means that if you download a 10GB dataset, you’ll have at least a 10GB Docker image for your repository.

Another common task is to ensure some code is run just before users begin their session. You can accomplish this with a start configuration file. This file will be run just before an interactive session begins. It will not be baked into your Binder repository’s Docker image.

Sharing course content and educational material

Binder gives users quick, interactive experiences with computational material that you provide. This can be useful in a teaching context, where you’d like students to quickly dive-in to the work you are covering.

It is beyond the scope of the Binder documentation to cover the many ways that Binder can be used in an educational context. We recommend checking out the Jupyter for Education guide for a collection of information about creating courses with open source content, including how to incorporate Binder into your course.

Generating interactive open-source package documentation

Binder is a useful resource for those who are developing packages in an open source language such as Python, Julia, or R. It’s important to give users the ability to quickly interact with features, APIs, and tutorials that teach people how (and why) to use a package.

Binder is useful for generating quick, interactive experiences that serve this purpose. For example, Sphinx-Gallery allows you to build documentation from Python examples and create a visual gallery for each. It can automatically create Binder links for each page. In addition, the R community has a tool called holepunch that helps you quickly generate binder-ready repositories for R workflows.

For more information about all of the things you can do with Binder, see the Configuration Files page or see the whole Binder Documentation.