First impression of jupyter lab app: I cannot change the root working directory on Windows 10 to a network share easily

[backhausmartin]

Hi, thanks for developing this standalone Jupyter Lab App.

I did a very first test run and unfortunately had problems to change the root working directory.

All my files are on a network share that are mapped to a Windows 10 drive letter.

Using File - Open from path does not work to switch to this folder.

The command line argument C:\JupyterLab\jupyterlab --notebook-dir also fails.

Is there a 1 click way to change the root working directory?

I would like to also recommend to make clear where “Jupyter Server Root” is currently actually pointing to.

Expected behaviour: I can open any Jupyter Notebook within 1 min accesible within Windows Explorer without setting up any special config, CL-arguments.
Current behaviour: I cannot open existing Jupyter Notebooks.

Best regards,
Martin

[krassowski]

I don’t have an answer, but just two suggestions:

• you could try to create a symbolic link as a workaround so that you could access the drive by entering a virtual directory rather than by switching the root directory,
• for jupyterlab-app (now JupyterLab Desktop)-specific queries you may have more luck by opening an issue in the repository itself GitHub - jupyterlab/jupyterlab-desktop: JupyterLab desktop application, based on Electron.

[backhausmartin]

Hi it looks like you can now do a jlab <path_to_external_drive> as now mentioned in the README.md

add launch documentation

It immediately worked after installing latest version (3.2.1-1) and running the command in Windows 10 Powershell as user (non-admin) - doing everything that is recommended during installation.