Pre-requisite technologies#

The following are tools and technologies that mybinder.org uses. You should have a working familiarity with them in order to make changes to the mybinder.org deployment.

This is a non-exhaustive list. Feel free to ask us questions on the gitter channel or here if something specific could be clearer!

Google Cloud Platform#

MyBinder.org currently runs on Google Cloud. There are two Google Cloud projects that we use:

  1. binder-staging is no longer in use

  2. binder-prod contains all resources for the production deployment

While you only need merge access in this repository to deploy changes, ideally you should also have access to the two Google Cloud Projects so you can debug things when deployments fail.

Kubernetes#

We heavily use Kubernetes for the mybinder.org deployment, and it is important you have a working knowledge of how to use Kubernetes. Detailed explanations are out of the scope of this repository, but there is a good list of tutorials. Specifically, going through the interactive tutorial to get comfortable using kubectl is required.

Helm#

We use helm to manage our deployments, and it is important you have a working knowledge of how to use helm. Detailed explanations are out of the scope of this repository, but docs.helm.sh is an excellent source of information. At a minimum, you must at least understand:

GitHub Actions#

We use GitHub Actions for doing all our deployments. Our .github/workflows/cd.yml file contains the entire configuration for our continuous deployment.

Because mybinder.org dependes on JupyterHub, BinderHub and repo2docker, we also use GitHub Actions to watch those dependencies once every day and, if needed, create a pull request. mybinder.org operators can manually trigger a dependency check by clicking the “Run workflow” button.