The College of Letters & Science IT (CIT)
SSMS | Life Sciences | Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4020
cit.ucsb.edu
BinderHub launches a live Jupyter environment directly from any git repository — no local setup required. Built on UCSB's JupyterHub infrastructure and hosted at https://binder.college.ucsb.edu, it enables instructors, researchers, and students to produce reproducible notebooks, share course materials, and run live demos with a single URL.
Authentication uses UCSB NetID credentials.
https://binder.college.ucsb.edu.notebooks/intro.ipynb).Note: The first launch of a given repository and commit may take several minutes while the container image is built. Subsequent launches of the same commit reuse the cached image and are significantly faster. See Container Image Archive for details on image caching and retention.
BinderHub recognizes the following configuration files in your repository root or subdirectories:
| File | Purpose |
|---|---|
requirements.txt |
Installs Python packages via pip. |
environment.yml |
Creates a conda environment from a YAML specification. |
Dockerfile |
Builds a fully custom container (advanced users). |
APT.txt |
Installs system-level packages via apt-get. Required packages must be listed one per line, in the format package-name. |
runtime.txt |
Specifies the Python version (e.g., 3.11). |
Only one build configuration file is needed per launch. If multiple are present, BinderHub uses them in the order listed above.
UCSB's single-user Jupyter images are public and can be used directly or as parent images in your repository's configuration (Dockerfile, environment.yml, etc.). Available base images via the UCSB-PSTAT Organization on GitHub:
The Binder URL can be copied and shared with anyone. Anyone with the link independently launches the identical environment from the source repository. No additional setup is required for users.
requirements.txt for a lighter image, or pre-building a custom Dockerfile with all dependencies already installed.