Rebuilding Project Pythia's gallery on reusable MyST tooling

At the 2026 Pythia Cookoff at NCAR, we spent some hackathon time rebuilding the Project Pythia Cookbook Gallery and blog on shared MyST Engine tooling, replacing the one-off custom scripts Pythia had been using before.

The gallery and blog now run on the same new myst-listing plugin, which we created in the new myst-contrib organization. It defines an experimental collect -> transform -> display pipeline for turning sources of content into galleries, blogs, or other listings. Two very different pages running on one plugin is a good sign it can generalize!

We also pushed on clinder, a BinderHub CLI and GitHub Action that allows you to execute a Jupyter Book’s notebooks on mybinder.org in CI instead of on the Actions machine. This is a nice fit for cookbook-style content that requires additional computational resources to run. It now has docs, preview deploys, and tests on PRs.

We also managed the JupyterHub that participants worked on (including a few late-night fixes heroically made by Angus). The Pythia team used the new build your own environment feature in JupyterHub to build a custom environment for each cookbook! And we spent time with the Pythia team gathering feedback on the Jupyter Book and JupyterHub improvements they’d most like to see next.

Learn more #

• Chris’s write-up on the Pythia blog
• myst-listing plugin docs
• clinder documentation

Acknowledgements #

Thanks to Project Pythia for hosting the Cookoff, and to our member communities whose memberships cover foundational upstream contributions like these.