binder ImportError

[jGaboardi]

When launching a binder and opening the notebooks in examples/ there are ImportError for:

• matplotlib (choropleths, overlays, and spatial_joins)

• pysal (choropleths)

This seems to be due to matplotlib and pysal not being declared as dependencies in requirements.txt. I am aware they are not geopandas dependencies, but in order to run the binder interactively maybe a separate binder.yml must be built? I am not exactly sure how to solve this issue.

[jorisvandenbossche]

Yep, thanks for the report. We might also want to add a environment.yml file instead (for using conda).

Also, the latest sphinx gallery has the option to launch binder from their examples, so that is also something that we could check.

[jGaboardi]

@jorisvandenbossche good ideas. I am also looking to implement this in pysal/spaghetti since most notebooks require plotting and some other non-dependency library.

[jorisvandenbossche]

Basically, if there is a environment.yml file, binder will take this first and not the requirements.txt, see https://mybinder.readthedocs.io/en/latest/using.html#preparing-a-repository-for-binder

[jorisvandenbossche]

In geopandas' case, we already have such a file for the documentation: https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/blob/master/doc/environment.yml, so maybe we could somehow re-use that

[martinfleis]

I believe that our binder environment works properly now (on main).