Share notebooks and content files

You’ll often want to distribute content (such as notebooks, scripts, sample data, etc) to your users so they can do exercises, follow along with a lecture, or use as a starting point for their own work. This content is often constantly updated as time goes on, and needs to not overwrite your student’s work if you make an adjustment to content that has already been touched by the student.

nbgitpuller is the tool we recommend for this. The workflow goes something like this:

Ensure that nbgitpuller is installed in your user environment

The default environment for 2i2c JupyterHubs has nbgitpuller pre-installed. However, if you define a custom environment for your hub’s users, you’ll need to ensure that nbgitpuller is installed in order for users to use it!

Put your content in a public GitHub repository

Create a repository on GitHub and start putting your content there. This is the source of the content that will be distributed to your users. You can update it as often as you wish. While instructors will need to know how github works, your users will never have to interact with git directly.

Generate an nbgitpuller link

Generate an nbgitpuller link. This generates a clickable link that contains within it the following pieces of information:

1. The URL to your hub. Upon clicking the link, users will be redirected to this hub, and content will be pulled into their home directory there.

2. The URL of the git repository where the content lives.

3. The branch in the git repository where the content lives. The default specified there is master, although newer GitHub repositories use main as the default. You can find yours on the Github page of your content repository

4. The default interface to open when users click this link. The default is the classic notebook, but many other apps are available.

5. A file to open when the link is clicked. When left empty, a directory listing with the content of the repository will be shown.

The nbgitpuller.link user interface, along with some important fields highlighted.

Tip

Unfortunately, RStudio does not support opening a specific file, and will always show the home directory. Users will have to manually navigate to the appropriate file.

Once you’ve filled these out, you can copy the link from the textbox above the form.

Distribute your nbgitpuller link

Distribute the link you have generated to your users. Upon clicking the link, they will be:

1. Redirected to your hub, and asked to log in if they have not already

2. The first time the link is clicked, your content repository will be pulled into their home directory!

3. If they had already clicked the link before, any new changes in your content repository will be pulled in. Any changes the user has made will be automatically merged with changes in the content repository, in such a way that the user’s changes are never overwritten. All merge conflicts will also be automatically resolved, so users don’t have to interact with git.

4. If you have picked a specific file to be displayed, the user will be redirected to that file, open in the application you picked. If not, the directory listing of local copy of the content repository will be shown in the application you selected.

Important

You do not have to create a new link each time you update your content repository! The same link will continue to work, so you can simply ask your users to click the link again to fetch the latest changes.

However, if you want to create links to individual files that should be opened at specific points - like one link per class or assignment - you can regenerate the links with different values for the file to open or interface. As long as the hub url, content repository url and the branch name are the same, users will be not be duplicating content.