Jupyter Notebook stuck at localhost:8xxx/tree
[Moved from Data Science Stack Exchange to here, 10/17/2019]
I have seen something like this question asked 4 times before. But no one has provided an answer, so far. See:
Stack Overflow - Can't see my project in Jupiter notebook anymore
Super User - Jupyter Notebook Error: display nothing on "http://localhost:8888/tree"
Super User - Jupyter notebook loses directory tree periodically
Super User - Jupyter Notebook not opening for Anaconda Navigator environment other than base
[Screenshot showing Jupyter Notebook launched from an Anaconda command prompt, and resulting web page opened in Chrome]
I'm running Anaconda 3 on a Windows 7 PC. I have been using Jupyter Notebooks for nearly a year on this machine. One day, a couple of weeks back, I could no longer do anything useful with Jupyter Notebooks. I can launch Jupyter from an Anaconda prompt or by clicking on the link in my Start Menu (under Anaconda3) or by lauching Anaconda Navigator and clicking from there. In all cases, everything looks OK except that I get stuck at the root of my notebook tree and I can't get to, or otherwise open an iPython notebook. I've tried using Chrome, Firefox, and (pwah!) Internet Explorer browsers and get the same result.
I've tried editing the Jupyter configuration file in my C:\Users\myname\.jupyter directory. I can tell from the text emitted when I start that Jupyter is picking up the info in that file, because I can change it and it changes the text output.
I tried uninstalling everything, Anaconda and even Python. Rebooting, and then re-installing Anaconda3. I was pretty disappointed when this didn't work. I have a feeling that there is an easy fix to this, but it is beyond me. To show an example, I'm attaching a screenshot of an Anaconda command window and how the browser looks when Notebook starts. I can, of course, type "file:///blah" into the address bar and I definitely get a view of the directory. But this breaks the Jupyter Notebook activity, so clicking on an *ipynb file just opens it in a text editor with all the JSON curly brackets and so forth. Not much use.
BTW, I have no trouble launching Spyder.
How can I navigate to, and open, an IPython notebook in Jupyter? Thanks.
Solution 1:
It is a bug in the latest update to jupyter notebooks. The workaround is to downgrade back to the most recent working copy. I really wanted a way that used conda and not pip to downgrade, and I found an excellent solution. Anaconda keeps an archive of previous releases of the entire system (conda + jupyter + spyder + ...). You can find the archive here:
https://repo.continuum.io/archive/
For me, the version that worked was the July 2019 release
https://repo.continuum.io/archive/Anaconda3-2019.07-Windows-x86_64.exe
First you must uninstall Anaconda completely and then install the archived version.