Multiple notebook repositories

[smithara]

1. Can we extend this so that it can handle multiple notebook sources. The reason for this is that I'd like to extend the launcher to also give access to notebooks at https://github.com/Swarm-DISC/FAC_exploration (and maybe more in the future?) - that is made as a separate repository to allow its autonomy as a separate project

2. Copy a whole notebook directory when clicking a particular launcher icon? Sometimes people write notebooks that depend on code in accompanying .py file (like in the repo above). This means the whole directory should be copied (and a given "starting" notebook opened).

[pacesm]

This sounds reasonable and I guess it won't be too hard to implement. We will need to update the loader to work with newer JupyterHub versions (#5) and this could be the opportunity to add these new features.

[smithara]

I got another request to improve this. Would it make sense to alter the launcher to add another section at the bottom with "Even more notebooks" (or similar) that would behave as described above? Each entry in that could be driven by a repository url in Aeolus-notebooks/notebooks.json / Swarm_notebooks/notebooks.json. The button would then trigger a download of the latest main branch of that repository.

Has there been any similar request from Aeolus? Essentially about making more notebooks visible from within the VRE and making them one-click accessible.

[pacesm]

I'm open to improvements of the example loader. I'm not sure though how difficult is to trigger a git pull from JLab UI and jump to the content of the new directory. Perhaps the nbgitpuller extension can be somehow employed.