Binderhub: Serve an "info" page for a Built Binder

[choldgraf]

There have been a few moments where people want access to meta information about a Binder from within a live session. A few that come to mind:

1. What is the "sharable link" for a Binder repository?
2. What is the github repo link that a Binder repository was built from?
3. Where are the logs for the build process?
4. Something @bitnik implemented - what is the token for my private binder repo so that I can _share_ it with others

What if we created an info/ page that was generated for each Binder repository. This could live at https://hub.mybinder.org/user/<pod-name>/info and would be a simple page with auto-generated HTML. Perhaps this could be a way to provide this information for people, without making a custom UI edit to the notebook/lab/rstudio/etc UI. What do folks think?

[betatim]

Making the build log available would be good and a new page would be the way to go.

The sharing links should be in the UI IMHO. So either as notebook extension or iframe around the content.

I don't think we should encourage people to share their private binder links, so I'd not have a button to copy&paste that URL. People would probably use it accidentally. There is already far too much confusion about which link you want to share when.

[willingc]

I agree with all except I do not think, at this time, we should officially support private tokens or repos. Better guidance would be to direct those using private repos to create their own binderhub.

[choldgraf]

That sounds good to me!

[betatim]

Chris could you clarify what you meant with "what is the token for my private binder repo so that I can share it with others". I took it as "how to share a live binder instance (made from a public repo)". Reading Carols comment I am now not so sure any more. If there is a way to use private git repositories with mybinder.org right now I'd consider that a bug we need to fix.

[choldgraf]

In this case I meant "sharing the notebook token for your session so that other people can connect to it". Not "using private github repos". I think @willingc and you make a good point re: avoiding sharing personal session tokens, so I'm happy not to have that in there.

[willingc]

@choldgraf I'm curious :-) What is the use case that prompted wanting to share a session token? Was the user's notebook accessing data that was not publicly available? Collaboration? ???

[choldgraf]

@willingc yep, I believe so. I think the GESIM folks are already using this. Basically, they have a button at the top of their page that, when clicked, gives you the URL to your live session that you can share with others. Presumably for collaboration and sharing live sessions. I think that deployment has different security concerns (e.g. it's authenticated, I believe), but I thought it was a very interesting idea