Ability to use notebook-specific environments for interactive code execution with Thebe

[michaelweinold]

Context

Part of the official Binder recommendations for reducing startup-time is this community article:

Tip: speed up Binder launches by pulling github content in a Binder link with nbgitpuller

Something people often want is to de-couple the content of a repository from the environment that is needed to run it. This would allow you to update the content of a repo without needing to re-build the Binder needed for it.

Is there currently any way to either

1. Ensure a notebook-specific Conda environment is used when executing a notebook? As far as I understand, the environment.yml in the root directory takes precedence when I use the following config settings

launch_buttons:
  notebook_interface: "classic"
  binderhub_url: "https://mybinder.org"
  thebe: true

repository:
  url: https://github.com/<usr>/<repo>
  branch: master

2. Use the suggestion in the Binder community article to have the environment defined in one repo and use it to execute code in my jupyter-book notebooks with Thebe?

Proposal

N/A

Tasks and updates

N/A

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[michaelweinold]

Potentially related:

https://github.com/executablebooks/jupyter-book/issues/1348 https://github.com/executablebooks/meta/discussions/190

also, from https://github.com/executablebooks/jupyter-book/issues/517:

The jupyter-book binder setup is contained in .binder at the root level of the repository.

Could this be configured in the binder folder?