Customizing your BinderHub deployment#

JupyterHub customization#

Because BinderHub uses JupyterHub to manage all user sessions, you can customize many aspects of the resources available to the user. This is primarily done by modifications to your BinderHub’s Helm chart (config.yaml).

To make edits to your JupyterHub deplyoment via config.yaml, use the following pattern:

binderhub:
   jupyterhub:
      <JUPYTERHUB-CONFIG-YAML>

For example, see this section of the mybinder.org Helm Chart.

For information on how to configure your JupyterHub deployment, see the JupyterHub for Kubernetes Customization Guide.

If you want to customise the spawner you can subclass it in extraConfig. For example:

binderhub:
  jupyterhub:
    hub:
      extraConfig:
        10-binder-customisations: |
          class MyCustomBinderSpawner(BinderSpawner):
              ...

          c.JupyterHub.spawner_class = MyCustomBinderSpawner

BinderHub uses the jupyterhub.hub.extraConfig setting to customise JupyterHub. For example, BinderSpawner is defined under the 00-binder key. Keys are evaluated in alphanumeric order, so later keys such as 10-binder-customisations can use objects defined in earlier keys.

About page customization#

BinderHub serves a simple about page at https://BINDERHOST/about. By default this shows the version of BinderHub you are running. You can add additional HTML to the page by setting the c.BinderHub.about_message configuration option to the raw HTML you would like to add. You can use this to display contact information or other details about your deployment.

Template customization#

BinderHub uses Jinja template engine and it is possible to customize templates in a BinderHub deployment. Here it is explained by a minimal example which shows how to use a custom logo.

Before configuring BinderHub to use custom templates and static files, you have to provide these files to the binder pod where the application runs. One way to do this using Init Containers and a Git repo.

Firstly assume that you have a Git repo binderhub_custom_files which holds your custom files:

binderhub_custom_files/
├── static
│   └── custom_logo.svg
└── templates
    └── page.html

where page.html extends the base page.html and updates only the source url of the logo in order to use your custom logo:

{% extends "templates/page.html" %}

{% block logo_image %}"{{ EXTRA_STATIC_URL_PREFIX }}custom_logo.svg"{% endblock logo_image %}

Note

If you want to extend any other base template, you have to include {% extends "templates/<base_template_name>.html" %} in the beginning of your custom template. It is also possible to have completely new template instead of extending the base one. Then BinderHub will ignore the base one.

Now you can use Init Containers to clone that Git repo into a volume (custom-templates) which is mounted to both init container and binder container. To do that add the following into your config.yaml:

initContainers:
  - name: git-clone-templates
    image: alpine/git
    args:
      - clone
      - --single-branch
      - --branch=main
      - --depth=1
      - --
      - <repo_url>
      - /etc/binderhub/custom
    securityContext:
      runAsUser: 0
    volumeMounts:
      - name: custom-templates
        mountPath: /etc/binderhub/custom
extraVolumes:
  - name: custom-templates
    emptyDir: {}
extraVolumeMounts:
  - name: custom-templates
    mountPath: /etc/binderhub/custom

Note

You have to replace <repo_url> with the url of the public repo (binderhub_custom_files) where you have your templates and static files.

The final thing you have to do is to configure BinderHub, so it knows where to look for custom templates and static files (where the volume is mounted). To do that update your config.yaml by the following:

config:
  BinderHub:
    template_path: /etc/binderhub/custom/templates
    extra_static_path: /etc/binderhub/custom/static
    extra_static_url_prefix: /extra_static/
    template_variables:
        EXTRA_STATIC_URL_PREFIX: "/extra_static/"

Warning

You have to set the extra_static_url_prefix different than /static/ which is the default static url prefix of BinderHub. Otherwise default one overrides it and BinderHub only uses default static files.

Note

In this example a custom template variable (EXTRA_STATIC_URL_PREFIX) to hold the value of extra_static_url_prefix is also defined, which was used in custom page.html. This is good to do specially if you have many custom templates and static files.

Custom configuration for specific repositories#

Sometimes you would like to provide a repository-specific configuration. For example, if you’d like certain repositories to have higher pod quotas than others, or if you’d like to provide certain resources to a subset of repositories.

To override the configuration for a specific repository, you can provide a list of dictionaries that allow you to provide a pattern to match against each repository’s specification, and override configuration values for any repositories that match this pattern.

Note

If you provide multiple patterns that match a single repository in your spec-specific configuration, then later values in the list will override earlier values.

To define this list of patterns and configuration overrides, use the following pattern in your Helm Chart (here we show an example using GitHubRepoProvider, but this works for other RepoProviders as well):

config:
    GitHubRepoProvider:
      spec_config:
        - pattern: ^ines/spacy-binder.*:
          config:
             key1: value1
        - pattern: pattern2
          config:
             key1: othervalue1
             key2: othervalue2

For example, the following specification configuration will assign a pod quota of 999 to the spacy-binder repository, and a pod quota of 1337 to any repository in the JupyterHub organization.

config:
    GitHubRepoProvider:
      spec_config:
        - pattern: ^ines/spacy-binder.*:
          config:
             quota: 999
        - pattern: ^jupyterhub.*
          config:
             quota: 1337

Banning specific repositories#

You may want to exclude certain repositories from your BinderHub instance. You can do this by providing a list of banned_spec patterns. BinderHub will not accept URLs matching any of the banned patterns.

For example, the following configuration will prevent notebooks in the spacy-binder repository and the ml-training repository from launching.

config:
  GitHubRepoProvider:
    # Add banned repositories to the list below
    # They should be strings that will match "^<org-name>/<repo-name>.*"
    banned_specs:
      - ^ines/spacy-binder.*
      - ^aschen/ml-training.*
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