What this package does

holepunch will read the contents of your R project on GitHub, create a DESCRIPTION file with all dependencies, write a Dockerfile, add a badge to your README, and build a Docker image. Once these 4 steps are complete, any reader can click the badge and within minutes, be dropped into a free, live, RStudio server. Here they can run your scripts and notebooks and see how everything works.

Motivation

Binder is an open source project that can take any most GitHub repos of notebooks (R or Jupyter) and turn them into a free, live instance that not only has all dependencies ready to go but also provides Jupyter or Rstudio server to run the code on. The instances are small and should not be used to demonstrate resource intensive computation. However they are ideal for reproducing papers/figures/examples and make a great addition to any public analysis project that is being hosted on GitHub.

binder-bam

Why this is awesome

  • You can launch a free instance of Rstudio server from any of your projects on GitHub. The instance will have all of your dependencies and version of R installed and ready to go!
  • Easily allow anyone (up to 100 simultaneous users) to replicate or modify your analysis
  • Free

Limitations

  • The server has limited memory so you cannot load large datasets or run big computations
  • Binder is meant for interactive and ephemeral interactive coding so an instance will die after 10 minutes of inactivity.
  • An instance cannot be kept alive for more than 12 hours

Installation

remotes::install_github("karthik/holepunch")
# Please report any installation problems in the issues

Testing this package

An easy way to test this package without writing any code is to visit the binder-test repo and follow the instructions.

Roadmap

The ETA for the first release of this package is fall 2019 (after renv goes to CRAN). Comments, suggestions for improving the workflow or any other comments welcome in the issues. Other planned features include:

  • Full support for GitHub packages
  • Support for Bioconductor packages
  • Reference Binders to separate environment from code (still in early planning)

Code of conduct

Please note that the ‘holepunch’ project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.