Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Binder?

A Binder is a Git repository that has been outfitted with the appropriate build files so that its content can be connected with a BinderHub instance. Currently these repositories mostly live on GitHub, though we plan on supporting more online repositories such as GitLab or BitBucket.

What is the Binder community?

A collection of people that aim to make it easy to turn computational material (e.g. Jupyter notebooks, R scripts, and environment files) into computational environments (a Docker image) and serve this environment through the cloud. The underlying technology that manages this process is called BinderHub.

For more information, check out About

What is BinderHub?

BinderHub is the server technology that turns computational material into interactive computational environments in the cloud. It utilizes Kubernetes and JupyterHub in order to simplify the deployment process and make it easy to scale.

What is is a single deployment of a BinderHub instance, managed by the Binder community. It serves as both a public service and a demonstration of the BinderHub technology, though it is by no means the only BinderHub in existence. If you’re interested in deploying your own BinderHub for your own uses, please see the BinderHub documentation and don’t hesitate to reach out to the Binder community.

For more information, check out About

Is free to use?

Yes! Though note that it has relatively limited computational resources.

How much does running cost?

Great question! If you’re interested in the technical costs of running, we publish a semi-up-to-date dataset of our costs at the binder-data repository. In addition, you can explore these costs with the binder link below!

How can be free to use?

See About for more information on the team and who provides the resources to pay for the service. Generally, is run with modest resources provided to users in order to keep costs down. In the future we hope to see more public BinderHub services running that can form a collection of community resources for interactive cloud computing.

How much memory am I given when using Binder?

If you or another Binder user clicks on a Binder link, the deployment will run the linked repository. While running, users are guaranteed at least 1GB of RAM, with a maximum of 2GB. This means you will always have 1GB, you may occasionally have between 1 and 2GB, and if you go over 2GB your kernel will be restarted.

How long will my Binder session last?

Binder is meant for interactive and ephemeral interactive coding, meaning that it is ideally suited for relatively short sessions. Binder will automatically shut down user sessions that have more than 10 minutes of inactivity (if you leave your window open, this will be counted as “activity”).

Binder aims to provide at least 12 hours of session time per user session. Beyond that, we cannot guarantee that the session will remain running.

Can I use for a live demo or workshop?

For sure! We hope the demo gods are with you. Please do make sure you have a backup plan in case there is a problem with during your workshop or demo. Occasionally, service on can be degraded, usually because the server is getting a lot of attention somewhere on the internet, because we are deploying new versions of software, or the team can’t quickly respond to an outage.

How does ensure user privacy?

We take user privacy very seriously! Because Binder runs as a public, free service, we don’t require any kind of log-in that would let us keep track of user data. All code that is run, data analyzed, papers reproduced, classes taught - in short, everything that happens in a Binder session - is destroyed when the user logs off or becomes inactive for more than a few minutes.

Here are the pieces of information we do keep: We run google analytics with anonymized IPs and no cookies, which gives us just enough information to know how Binder is being used, and but won’t be able to identify users. We also retain logs of IP addresses for 30 days, which is used solely in the case of detecting abuse of the service. If you have suggestions for how we can ensure the privacy of our data and users, we’d love to hear it!

How secure is

The Binder team has put in a lot of work to ensure that the service runs as secure as possible. However, it is a free, public service that is open to the world, and you should never share sensitive or personal information within a Binder repository. This includes passwords, data that shouldn’t be public, API keys, etc.

You should ensure that sensitive information doesn’t make it into the built docker image for your Binder repository (aka, that it isn’t used in one of your configuration files) and that you don’t use this information from within a Binder session (e.g. hard-coding an API key into an HTTP request that you call from a Jupyter Notebook).

If you require private information within your Binder instance, consider deploying a BinderHub for your group.

Where can I report a security issue?

If you find a security vulnerability in with, please report it to


Can I push data from my Binder session back to my repository?

While it is technically possible to push information from a Binder session onto a platform like GitHub, we strongly discourage it. We cannot guarantee the security of data moving through, and your password or any sensitive data may be compromised. You shouldn’t do anything on that you wouldn’t mind sharing with the world!

Can I put my configuration files outside the root of my repository?

Yes! Configuration files may be placed in the root of your repository or in a binder/ folder in the root of your repository (i.e. myproject/binder/). If a binder/ folder is used, Binder will only read configuration files from that location (i.e. myproject/binder/requirements.txt) and will ignore those in the repository’s root (myproject/environment.yml and myproject/requirements.txt).

What factors influence how long it takes a Binder session to start?

Understanding why some operations take longer than others requires a very brief overview of the pieces of machinery at play with BinderHub. There two things worth mentioning:

  • A user pod is the virtual machine that runs a users’ code.
  • A node is the machine, running in the cloud, where a bunch of pods live. There are many nodes for a Binder server, depending on the number of people using the service.
  • A registry is a service in the cloud where Docker images are stored. BinderHub has the ability to push / pull from this registry, which it uses to manage Binder environment images.

With that being said, there are three primary things that need to happen any time someone clicks a Binder link.

  1. A Docker image for the link must exist in Binder’s image registry. If an image for the current ref of the repository doesn’t exist, one will be built and registered automatically using repo2docker. If your configuration files specify a large or complex environment, this will take some time while your image builds.
  2. The Docker image must exist on the node that the user will use. If it does not, then BinderHub will pull the image. If the image is large, this will take some time depending on the server load and image size.
  3. A pod for the user must be created to serve this Docker image. This usually happens in seconds, though may take longer if the server is under a heavy load.

These three things happen in a nested fashion. “3” always happens, “2” only happens the first time a node is used to serve a particular Docker image, “1” only happens the first time someone clicks a Binder link for a repository with an updated ref. They take roughly decreasing amounts of time to complete, so 1 >> 2 >> 3 in terms of how long each operation takes.

If Binder sessions take a while to start, but you know that your image has already been built, there’s a good chance you are in step 2, and the server is still pulling the image onto the node that you’ll be using. Please be patient!

Will repos with fewer notebooks launch faster? Should I split my notebooks into smaller repos?

Number of notebooks in a repo shouldn’t have any impact on binder launch time, assuming a docker image for that repo is already built. It is worth noting, however, that there is a limit to the number of instances of a repository that can be active at any moment in time.

Will repos that are launched often get prioritized and launch faster?

There isn’t any intentional prioritization for repos that are launched frequently, however, in practice the repos that launch more often will tend to launch faster. This is because if a user pod is put on a node that doesn’t already have the Docker image for that repo, then it’ll have to do a Docker pull first, which takes time. If a repo is launched a lot, then most likely it will already be on a given node.

What can I do if does not meet my needs? uses software called BinderHub to carry out its services. This is an Open Source, community-driven project that can be deployed on most cloud providers. If you desire more computational resources for users or want guaranteed uptime, consider setting up your own BinderHub deployment.

For more information, see the BinderHub documentation for instructions on how to deploy your own BinderHub, and the Zero to JupyterHub documentation for how to customize the user environment.

How can I cite Binder?

For information on how to cite Binder, see Citing Binder.