Binder: Docker for GitHub
You must have seen someone’s GitHub code and tried to copy that code to try.
We often use Github to showcase the work done to open source community so that others can take benefit. Also, we often fork or pull code from other’s repo for our use. Then there are times when we just want to see how the code will work and fiddle around the code a bit to see if it can fit our requirements, but we end up trying to run notebook in our machines. Binder comes to the rescue.
Binder is here to “Turn a Git repo into a collection of interactive notebooks” just like Plotly can turn our boring matplotlib plots into interactive and beautiful plots. “With Binder, open those notebooks in an executable environment, making your code immediately reproducible by anyone, anywhere.”
It’s very easy to use Binder, just follow a few simple steps:
- Have a setup file in root of your repository. It can be any file like requirements.txt (for python dependencies), setup.py, docker file, environment.yml (for conda dependencies) and many more.
- Go to Binder and fill the necessary information related to your Github repository.
- Add the Binder badge, link to your Github repo.
4. It’s done!!!
That’s it. It’s that simple. Now anyone can execute and reproduce the results which you wanted to share and might have less setup related issues reported in your GitHub repo :)
