Currently it seems to fail even when you do give it a ref.

 jupyter-repo2docker https://github.com/binder-examples/requirements --ref master

Fails on master for me.

jupyter-repo2docker https://github.com/binder-examples/requirements --ref master also fails on master for me. Inspecting ref just before calling _contains gives None.

Yup. Looks like it's related to argparse issue somewhere, most likely in the 'cmd' arg.

The following works:

jupyter-repo2docker --ref  d7f774a1af892319cd1483fa2255c24511876375 https://github.com/binder-examples/requirements

The following does not:

jupyter-repo2docker https://github.com/binder-examples/requirements --ref  d7f774a1af892319cd1483fa2255c24511876375

This is on this branch, not master.

If anything, it looks like we'd just been building master for a while instead of whatever ref was passed in. Your PR removed the superfluous 'if not ref' line, causing the problem to actually show :)

If anything, it looks like we'd just been building master for a while instead of whatever ref was passed in.

👌 nice ;-)

Agree, if you pass --ref after the URL then args.ref is None right after parsing the arguments. After that everything "works", except we lost the ref.

I made a patch to binderhub: jupyterhub/binderhub#234

Ok, this can be deployed again, but jupyterhub/binderhub#234 should probably also be deployed alongside this to make sure we're actually building the versions we wanna.

I think we should declare passing an --arg after the URL as undefined behaviour. If you do pass something after the URL (jupyter-repo2docker https://github.com/binder-examples/requirements --ref master) you get:

Namespace(build=True, clean=True, cmd=['--ref', 'master'],
config='repo2docker_config.py', debug=False, image_name=None,
json_logs=False, push=False, ref=None,
repo='https://github.com/binder-examples/requirements', run=True)

from parse_args(). We could inspect cmd to see if it contains an argument that is also a repo2docker argument and then exit. However I think that is a bit too much heuristics (you could legitimately have a --ref in the command you want to execute).