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Tweak Pipfile Binder post

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Jez Cope 2019-03-14 20:48:33 +00:00
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posts/2019-03-pipfile-binder-two-lines.md
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attrlink="https://unsplash.com/photos/K-ZsC7YdJ6Y?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText"
class="main-illustration fw" %}}
I recently attended a workshop, organised by the team of the Turing Way project, on a tool called BinderHub. BinderHub, along with public hosting platform [MyBinder][], allows you to publish computational notebooks online as "binders" such that they're not static but fully interactive. It's able to do this by using a tool called repo2docker to capture the full computational environment and dependencies required to run the notebook.
I recently attended a workshop, organised by the excellent team of the [Turing Way project][], on a tool called BinderHub. BinderHub, along with public hosting platform [MyBinder][], allows you to publish computational notebooks online as "binders" such that they're not static but fully interactive. It's able to do this by using a tool called repo2docker to capture the full computational environment and dependencies required to run the notebook.
The process goes roughly like this:
!!! aside "What is the Turing Way?"
The Turing Way is, in its own words, "a lightly opinionated guide to reproducible data science." The team is building an open textbook and running a number of workshops for scientists and research software engineers, and you should [check out the project on Github][Turing Way project]. You could even contribute!
1. Do some work in a computational notebook format (such as Jupyter or Rmd)
The Binder process goes roughly like this:
1. Do some work in a [Jupyter Notebook][] or similar
2. Put it into a public git repository
3. Add some extra metadata describing the packages and versions your code relies on
4. Go to [mybinder.org][] and tell it where to find your repository
4. Go to [mybinder.org][MyBinder] and tell it where to find your repository
5. Open the URL it generates for you
6. Profit
[mybinder.org]: https://mybinder.org
Other than step 5, which can take some time to build the binder, this is a remarkably quick process. It supports a number of different languages too, including built-in support for R, Python and Julia and the ability to configure pretty much any other language that will run on Linux.
However, the Python support currently requires you to have either a `requirements.txt` or Conda-style `environment.yml` file to specify dependencies, and I commonly use a [`Pipfile`][Pipfile] for this instead. `Pipfile` allows you to specify a loose range of compatible versions for maximal convenience, but then locks in specific versions for maximal reproducibility. You can upgrade packages any time you want, but you're fully in control of when that happens, and the locked versions are checked into version control so that everyone working on a project gets consistency.
@ -57,3 +58,5 @@ With these two files, the binder builds and runs as expected. You can [see a com
[Pipfile]: https://github.com/pypa/pipfile
[pipenv]: https://pipenv.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
[Kenneth Reitz]: http://kennethreitz.org/
[Turing Way project]: https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way
[Jupyter Notebook]: /blog/jupyter-notebooks-introduction/