Can we use the .ipynb notebooks in Binder?

[lesteve]

The easiest way to set up Binder was to use the .py files (loaded as notebook on the fly with Jupytext). Basically the generated URL reuse the file it was generated from.

That means that the logic to keep nice-looking admonitions in https://github.com/INRIA/scikit-learn-mooc/blob/master/build_tools/convert-python-script-to-notebook.py is not applied. Probably not that high-priority as Binder is used as a fall-back solution.

• is there a way to configure Binder to use the generated notebooks as URL?
• do we want to do that? We update the generated notebooks from time to time so the Binder content would lag behind master a bit. I guess that's probably fine.

[GaelVaroquaux]

I'm going to teach a course, and I was looking at the simplest way to reuse materials from the MOOC, and I agree that, in the long run it would be very nice if the binder was working as well as possible. So, if anyone has extra energy and want to improve things, as suggested above, I'm clearly supportive.

[lesteve]

Tips from my own course:

• I point them to the local install instructions: https://github.com/INRIA/scikit-learn-mooc/blob/main/local-install-instructions.md
• I use Binder as fall-back, I make sure I warm up the cache with a fixed commit e.g. https://gke.mybinder.org/v2/gh/INRIA/scikit-learn-mooc/421b2b0?filepath=full-index.md for 421b2b0 and I give them the URL with the fixed commit. For some reasons the docker image caching mechanism did not seem to work correctly when using the binder generic address so I switched to a fixed binder provider (Google in this case)

[GaelVaroquaux]

Thanks for the tips! I only have one hour, and the participants are not technical at all. I worry that I will loose too much time on having them install things locally. I'm warming the cache just before the course, I hope that it will work well.

[lesteve]

Actually I thought about a possible hack (if what we want is not easily doable within JupyterBook): rewrite the link target with some js in _static/sklearn_mooc.js. We can find the binder button with js:

var el = document.getElementsByClassName('binder-button')[0]

The URL is something like this:
https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/INRIA/scikit-learn-mooc/main?urlpath=tree/python_scripts/01_tabular_data_exploration.py

So we want to replace python_scripts -> notebooks and .py -> .ipynb and it should "just" work