JupyterLab on Binder

JupyterLab works out of the box with Binder, and can even run side by side with the classic Notebook.

Override default settings

It can be useful to change the default settings of JupyterLab for example to open Markdown file with the Markdown preview by default. To do that, you will need to add those two files in your Binder configuration:

overrides.json
{
  "@jupyterlab/docmanager-extension:plugin": {
    "defaultViewers":
      {
        "markdown": "Markdown Preview"
      }
  }
}
postBuild
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -eux

mkdir -p ${NB_PYTHON_PREFIX}/share/jupyter/lab/settings
cp overrides.json ${NB_PYTHON_PREFIX}/share/jupyter/lab/settings

Jupyter Server v2 or above

Starting with JupyterLab 3.5.0, you can use either Jupyter Server v1 or v2. That dependency is maintained independently of JupyterLab as another project within the Jupyter organization. The source code and issues tracker can be found on GitHub.

Unfortunately by default, Binder does not support Jupyter Server v2 or above. If you need that specific version (e.g. it is needed for real time collaboration starting with JupyterLab 3.6.0), you will need to add the following file in your Binder configuration to override the default application start up:

start
#!/bin/bash

set -e

echo $@

exec jupyter-lab "${@:4}"