# Jupyter Notebook File Serving

**URL:** <https://discourse.openondemand.org/t/jupyter-notebook-file-serving/1456>\
**Category:** Get Help\
**Created:** [April 30, 2021, 8:45pm UTC](https://discourse.openondemand.org/t/jupyter-notebook-file-serving/1456 "2021-04-30T20:45:37Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![jpuerto-psc](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex015/user_avatar/discourse.openondemand.org/jpuerto-psc/32/590_2.png) [@jpuerto-psc](https://discourse.openondemand.org/u/jpuerto-psc)\
**Post date:** [April 30, 2021, 8:45pm UTC](https://discourse.openondemand.org/t/jupyter-notebook-file-serving/1456/1 "2021-04-30T20:45:37Z")

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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

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**Author:** ![mjbludwig](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex015/user_avatar/discourse.openondemand.org/mjbludwig/32/684_2.png) [@mjbludwig](https://discourse.openondemand.org/u/mjbludwig)\
**Post date:** [May 3, 2021, 12:27pm UTC](https://discourse.openondemand.org/t/jupyter-notebook-file-serving/1456/2 "2021-05-03T12:27:09Z")

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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](https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab/issues/9265)) 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…

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**Author:** ![westburg.2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/0ea827/32.png) [@westburg.2](https://discourse.openondemand.org/u/westburg.2)\
**Post date:** [May 26, 2022, 3:42pm UTC](https://discourse.openondemand.org/t/jupyter-notebook-file-serving/1456/3 "2022-05-26T15:42:55Z")

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