Build a BinderHub

18 March 2019 - 09:00-16:00

COM-G12-Main Lewin

Turing Way (inc. Anna Krystalli and Becky Arnold), University of Sheffield

All of our events may be recorded and shared via the University of Sheffield Kaltura platform so those who cannot attend may still benefit. We will consider your attendance implict consent to this.

Funders and publishers are beginning to require that publications include access to the underlying data and the analysis code. Researchers can be supported in doing this through myBinder.org which allows you to share your software with others in the form of a single clickable link, making it easier for users and removing the need for you to worry about supporting lots of different platforms. This is a huge step forward in terms of supporting reproducibility but the public Binder instance, myBinder.org, requires all code and data to be fully open, and computational power and data storage is limited. One solution to this is to host your own BinderHub locally, allowing you to control who has access to code and data and to provide greater computational power.

During this free workshop we will demonstrate how to build your own BinderHub on Microsoft Azure cloud computing resources. We will help you get started with building a BinderHub on your institution’s computing platform and discuss the challenges of maintaining a BinderHub. At the end of the workshop you will know why this would be a useful resource for your team, and will know where to look for help and support building your institution’s BinderHub.

This workshop is for Research Software Engineers and IT staff who are:

• Interested in reproducibility, containers, Docker or continuous integration;
• Already familiar with Binder and R Markdown or Python for data science;
• Interested in setting up their own local BinderHub.

The Turing Way

This workshop is being run by The Turing Way project team. The Turing Way is a handbook to support students, their supervisors, funders and journal editors in ensuring that reproducible data science is “too easy not to do”. It is openly developed and any and all questions, comments and recommendations are welcome at our GitHub repository:

https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way

or in our gitter chat room. Our interdisciplinary team includes data scientists, research software engineers and librarians. We are all motivated to ensure that all results can be independently verified and built upon in future work and want to help as many people learn the skills and tools required to do so. We hope that workshop participants will also contribute their “tips and tricks” on using Binder to the book to share what they’ve learned with others.

Programme

• 9.30 - 10.00: Registration, coffee and introductions
• 10.00 - 10.30: Introduction to the workshop and The Turing Way
• 10.30 - 11.00: Introduction to Binder and why you should build a BinderHub
• 11.00 - 12.00: Practical session – Build your BinderHub
• 12.00 - 1.00: Lunch
• 1.00 - 2.45: Practical session – Build your BinderHub
• 2.45 - 3.00: Coffee
• 3.00 - 4.00: Looking forwards: Progress review, lessons learned and future strategies
• 4.00 - 5.00: Optional hangout with instructors