Binder now requires recognized environment files

[Philip Durbin]

From the Dataverse perspective, Binder is an external tool that can be configured to allow computation on datasets: https://guides.dataverse.org/en/6.10/admin/integrations.html#binder

I'm just passing along something I read at https://discourse.jupyter.org/t/ann-mybinder-org-will-no-longer-build-repos-without-any-environment-information/38461

"[ANN] mybinder.org will no longer build repos without any environment information

Due to some patterns of abuse, mybinder.org will no longer build repos which don’t contain any recognized environment files. In most cases, this should be a proper error that a repo isn’t suited to run on mybinder.org, but if you have a repo that relies only on the standard library and only contains notebooks, you might see errors where things worked before. If you specify information about your environment, even just the python version, it should continue to build."

I just tested this and got the expected error, which is "No environment specification found. See https://repo2docker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/configuration/ for supported files." (I'll attach a screenshot.)

This is a bummer, of course. Most datasets won't have the necessary files. We can encourage researchers to add them, but it was nice that in the past no special files were required. Certainly we can understand that the Binder folks need to protect their systems from abuse.

Thanks,

Phil

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Philip Durbin
Software Developer for http://dataverse.org
http://www.iq.harvard.edu/people/philip-durbin