A note on downloading and installing things into a Binderised repo, or a container built using repo2docker.
If you save the files into $HOME as part of the container build process, if you try to use the image outside of MyBinder you will find that if storage volumes or local directories are mounted onto $HOME, your saved files are clobbered.
The MyBinder / repo2docker build is pretty limiting in terms of permissions the default jovyan user has over the file system. $HOME is one place you can write to, but if you need somewhere outside the path, then $CONDA_DIR (which defaults to /srv/conda) is handy…
For example, I just tweaked my neo4j binder repo to install a downloaded neo4j server into that path.
OUseful.Info, the blog... 