Stencila in Binder

Aleksandra Pawlik, 11 May 2018

At the recent eLife sprint in Cambridge Daniel Nüst and Min Ragan-Kelley of Project Jupyter had chosen to do a project involving Stencila. Nokome Bentley joined them remotely and as a result you can now run Stencila projects on Binder connecting to a Jupyter kernel.

The project is putting the Stencila editor into a Docker container that can be launch with Binder enabling editing of Dar archives. Check out the Github repository.

Nokome spent the day working on adding support for running code cells. Since the base jupyter/minimal-notebook image already has a Jupyter kernel for Python installed he decided to enable Stencila's JupyterContext. It acts as a bridge between Stencila's API and Jupyter kernels. Nokome included the stencila-node Node.js package in the Docker image which provides the JupyterContext as well as a NodeContext (for executing Javascript) and a SqliteContext (for executing SQL).

Here's the result: a Stencila project running on Binder connecting to a Jupyter kernel