Tip: Interactive Python Notebooks With Binder

This is an overview of how to display your public GitHub repositories containing notebook files in an online interactive notebook using Binder and Jupyter.

Prerequisites

Getting started

We are simply going to publish any Jupyter notebook with a .ipynb extension in our public GitHub repository to Binder.

If you need an example repo, you can use my hello-jupyterlab repo.

Binder itself is simply a website that enables you to display your public GitHub repositories in an interactive notebook.

You can add your own public repo or add the link for my example https://github.com/okeeffed/hello-jupyter-lab.

Add the URL into the Build and launch a repository input and click Launch.

Exploring the notebook

Once the notebook has loaded (and assuming you are using my repo as an example), you can navigate to an example doc in docs/1_hello_requests.ipynb,

Once there, you can click on the Run button to execute the code and see the output.

We can go one step further by also adding more cells to print the responses:

Requests in action

Adding dependencies

Binder itself does a lot of the heavy lifting for you and supports a wide range of configuration files that you would use as part of dependency management.

In the case of the example, the Pipfile.lock is automatically identified and the dependencies were installed.

Resources and further reading

Photo credit: juvnsky