Jupyter Notebook File Serving

Good Afternoon All,

Looking for some advice here regarding how Jupyter Notebook is serving files. It appears that it is limited to show only the user’s home directory due to the default before.sh.erb script’s config option

c.NotebookApp.notebook_dir = '${HOME}'

However, if we set this to our root directory, the application starts in the root directory.

What we are hoping for is the following:

  • When the user launches the app, they are automatically directed to their ${HOME} directory.

  • The user has the ability to go elsewhere in the filesystem.

Any advice here would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Best regards,

Juan

Hi Juan,

I actually have an open Git issue with the Jupyter folks (Allow for multiple `c.NotebookApp.notebook_dir` paths · Issue #9265 · jupyterlab/jupyterlab · GitHub) regarding exactly this.

It’s been tagged as an enhancement/extension feature but no real movement has been made there.

The current “official” workaround is to just drop symlinks in /home to the other file spaces. This is clearly not a good solution for HPC as all of my OOD deployments are on clusters with 2 or more additional filesystems than /home.

Unfortunately, the issue does not come up enough for my users to justify some dev time and PR/upstreaming this feature to Jupyter…