Allow for multiple, different dependencies per repository

Hi,

Maybe this is already resolved but I can see it.

Simple use case: I have a repo with 2 notebooks, the first one with a very simple dependency and a second with a lot of heavy dependencies. I would like to define a specific environment for each notebook without having to create independent repositories.

For example, the following repo:

.
├── binder
│   ├── requirements_abc.txt
│   └── Dockerfile_def
├── notebooks
│   ├── abc.ipynb
│   └── def.ipynb
└── readme.txt

The actual url is:

https://mybinder.org/v2/<provider-name>/<org-name>/<repo-name>/<branch|commit|tag>?filepath=<path/to/notebook.ipynb>

And I (from a user perspective) would like something like:

https://mybinder.org/v2/<provider-name>/<org-name>/<repo-name>/<branch|commit|tag>?filepath=<path/to/notebook.ipynb>&dependencies=<binder/dependencies_file>

Maybe this could be achieved using tags and/or commits but this will require to overwrite the dependencies file on each new notebook commit.

Another workaround could be to use separate gists (#306) for each notebook and dependency file.

I don’t know if this make sense.

Thanks in advance.

[manics]

Hi @rbavery, would you mind posting this on the Discourse forum instead? https://discourse.jupyter.org/

There’s a wider potential audience who may be interested in the pros and cons. All Jupyter projects are community projects, and if enough of the community are interested the decision here may change, or we might find an alternative way to achieve what you want.

[kikocorreoso]

In a pinch, for users that write a script requiring some very specific dependency, you could also consider having them explicitly install that dependency at the top of the post. This could be informative for readers anyway, as often it’s useful to highlight things that are not part of the “standard scipy stack”. Think that’d work?

Yesterday, before reading your answer, I was thinking this could be a practical hack for our use case. Thanks for confirming it 😄

Thanks for the constructive feedback.