MyBinder.org serves two million launches

by the Binder Team

Since the beginning of 2018, the Binder community has been hosting a BinderHub at https://mybinder.org as a free public service. Today, we are proud to announce that this hub has served over two million Binders . To mark this milestone we would like to say a huge Thank You! to the large community of people who use, build , and fund the project. Without you this important public infrastructure would not be the user-friendly, reliable, well-supported and documented resource that we enjoy today. mybinder.org has enabled people from almost every country in the world to learn, participate and share countless projects, ideas and stories. Here’s to two million more!

A huge thank you to all those who help with building, using, and operating https://mybinder.org .

What is mybinder.org?

mybinder.org let’s you take a repository full of Jupyter notebooks or RMarkdown and turn it into a collection of interactive notebooks. You can share your work with anyone by sending them a simple link ( like this one ). All they have to do is open the link in a web browser and they can run those notebooks from anywhere in the world without having to install anything.

Who is using mybinder.org?

Currently about 70–80,000 Binders are launched every week. A lot of those are people who are looking for a quick and easy way to launch a Python or RStudio environment. However in the last week a notebook showing off fifty ways to solve Fizz Buzz has been getting a lot of love. Beyond those heavy hitters and short-lived audience favorites there is a long tail of over 400 unique repositories that get launched every week. It would take the rest of the post to list them all!

One last statistic that we are particularly proud of: over the last 80 days we have had users from almost all around the globe! Binder was started as a way to make computational research easier to share and reuse. We have been amazed at how many people around the world have used Binder for teaching classes, reproducing results, sharing interactive analyses, and making their work more accessible to others. We are particularly proud that this includes people from around the entire world.

Countries from which https://mybinder.org has received visitors between 22 August 2018 and 10 November 2018.

Data set of all launches on mybinder.org

mybinder.org is operated as a public infrastructure that is transparent, open, and inclusive. We chat ,discuss, and work in the open. This is why we are now publishing a new data set: a continuously updated log of every launch that happens on mybinder.org!

We would love to see people explore this data set as a public resource that describes the kinds of repositories being shared and launched on the public mybinder.org deployment.

A new badge!

One more thing … we thought now is a good time to give the trusty “Launch Binder” badge an overhaul. To improve the badge we put together some suggestions, reached out to the community , and within a few days received a lot of feedback and new ideas. After combining all the inputs, our new badge went live earlier this week. We present to you our new badge:

The new “Launch Binder” badge. Binder blue instead of bright red!

We hope you like it as much as we do. If you are in love with the old design or not quite ready to switch yet, do not worry! The old badge is not going anywhere. If you are using the old badge in your README it will continue to look the same as it always has.

If you do want to change a previously generated link to the new badge, edit the name of the SVG in the link from the old:

[![Binder](<a href="http://mybinder.org/badge.svg%29]%28http://beta.mybinder.org/v2/gh/binder-examples/r/master?filepath=index.ipynb%29" data-href="http://mybinder.org/badge.svg)](http://beta.mybinder.org/v2/gh/binder-examples/r/master?filepath=index.ipynb)" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://mybinder.org/<strong>badge.svg</strong>)](http://mybinder.org/v2/gh/binder-examples/r/master)</a>

to the new:

[![Binder](<a href="http://mybinder.org/badge.svg%29]%28http://beta.mybinder.org/v2/gh/binder-examples/r/master?filepath=index.ipynb%29" data-href="http://mybinder.org/badge.svg)](http://beta.mybinder.org/v2/gh/binder-examples/r/master?filepath=index.ipynb)" rel="nofollow noopener noopener" target="_blank">http://mybinder.org/<strong>badge_logo.svg</strong>)](http://mybinder.org/v2/gh/binder-examples/r/master)</a>Outro.

Open infrastructure in the cloud

The Binder project is a community-driven experiment in radically-open infrastructure. BinderHub, the underlying technology that powers a Binder deployment, is an open project and can be deployed in many other cloud environments. For example, see the Pangeo Binder deployment for geospatial analytics, or the Gesis Binder deployment for social sciences . We are excited to see the project head in new directions as we continue to grow the technology and the community around Binder.

Finally, we could not have done any of this without a ton of support from the Binder community. First, many thanks to the Moore Foundation for funding initial development of Binder’s underlying tech, and for helping us finance running the deployment at mybinder.org. Second, many thanks to the Binder project core team for fostering excellent technology and a great community. Finally, thanks to everybody in the Binder community — whether you’ve launched repositories, shared your Binders, participated in discussions, built features, helped design this post’s banner image (❤), or gave us some critical feedback. Binder’s purpose is to serve the community, and you all have made it so worth it!