Persistent storage

I’ve had a number of people (especially at universities) ask me if it’d possible to enable persistent storage with BinderHub. The most common use case seems to be to use a BinderHub server to let teachers create repositories/environments for their classes / bootcamps / etc, but they’d like students to have their own “space” where things will persist over time.

I anticipate these requests to just increase with time, but it’s also a bit unclear to me exactly how this functionality would be combined w/ BinderHub. Maybe this could behave in the same way that nbgitpuller does.

Just opening this issue since I noticed we don’t have another place in this repo where we discuss the topic. I’m curious if people have thoughts on a path forward for something like this.

Current status

https://github.com/jupyterhub/binderhub/issues/377#issuecomment-353501247

The primary thing preventing us from using persistent storage with binder is Authentication. We have no idea which disk should be mounted for which user. #323 should help fix that

[yuvipanda]

I agree! It’s not necessary for supporting persistent volumes, but very nice to have! Authentication is a blocker though.

[bitnik]

I am working on setting up a hub with auth and persistent storage (exploring options for @nthiery) over the next few weeks -> we should coordinate.

Sure

so how to coordinate best?

I think we had already something like this running. @bitnik is that correct?

Yes, once we tried it by using Kubespawener.lifecycle_hooks.postStart which does some cp, rm and ln but I am not sure if it was a good implementation.