Using repo2docker for local debugging/builds of mybinder.org repos

[betatim]

Hi 👋 !

I am one of the project leads for mybinder.org and saw you are doing some fairly complex stuff in your Dockerfile as well as rebuilding the repo a lot. Wanted to point you towards http://repo2docker.readthedocs.io/ which is the tool we use on mybinder.org that you can run locally. I find that with running it locally I get much faster turn around on debugging and easier to read logs. I don't know if you are debugging, just an educated guess :)

Super cool to see people from eurostat interested in Binder and making the data you have easier to access!

[betatim]

cc @mmatyi because as far as I can tell you aren't watching the repo and doing the committing.

[gjacopo]

@betatim I see that a new image is built every time we push something to the repo (besides any of the config files in the folder binder/): is this normal? Anyway we can avoid it (e.g. providing the docker image) ?

[betatim]

mybinder.org builds a new image for every commit. What a lot of people do is create a tag in git that they use in links they give out to users. So something like https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/eurostat/statistics-coded/some-tag-you-made. Then you can work on your repository and when there are enough changes to update the image (maybe once a day or once a week?) you move the tag.

The only downside is that new content doesn't appear in the binder instance until you move the tag.

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In general to try and speed up build times I'd try and consolidate the many files you have in the binder/ directory to see if you can simplify and use R packages from conda-forge. R packages from CRAN unfortunately take a very very long time to install on linux because there are no binaries.

[gjacopo]

@betatim Thanks for your help...and your patience! That's pretty clear, and actually that was already from the front page of mybinder. I should have checked that earlier! Thanks again!