How to change working directory?

JupyterHub
1

Hey Guys,

I need to change the Working Directory for my team.
I want to change the Working Directory to a network drive (on a storage server) instead of the local drive.

Is it possible? If yes, then how?

Thanks.

2

You didn’t make it clear whether this is for jupyterlab or jupyterhub.
On windows I made a short cut
Target
“C:\Program Files\Python38\Scripts\jupyter-lab.exe”
Start in
C:\Users\peter\Documents\ipynb

Before I made the short cut jupyterlab would always start in my c:\windows/ system32 directory because I start it as admin.
Oh jupyterhub each user has his own user area
/home/jupyter-user_name
The /home directory has a directory for each user.

3

Sorry if I wasn’t clear.
This is for JupyterHub.
The storage is on another server, we don’t want to save anything on the webserver!

Server01 - JupyterHub (Linux Web-server)
Server02 (Windows) - Data Storage (for all the users Working Directories data)

I hope it’s more clear now!

4

I’m not use to setting up JupyterHub but surely you should be able to use symlinks?
We use them in JupyterLab with the filebrowser.

5

What spawner are you using? I think it will vary based on that.

6

It’s surprising that there’s no option to choose a root directory from the menu gui, puts a dampener on the feeling for a first timer of being able install and get going, had me stumped for a bit. Here’s how to set it up:-

For JupyterLab on windows

Run command to generate config file
jupyter lab --generate-config
or
jupyter notebook --generate-config

Find Jupyter Lab config file location:-
C:\Users##accountname##.jupyter\jupyter_notebook_config.py

uncomment/alter following line with the root location you want to save your notebooks:-

The directory to use for notebooks and kernels.

c.NotebookApp.notebook_dir = ‘E:/files/jupyter/’

Restart JupyterLab

7

I could not find a place to change the /home/username directory but…
We created a share directory by modifying or adding a startup.py directory in
/home/jupyter-peter/.ipython/profile_default/startup
We added this

import sys
sys.path.append("/srv/shared/peter/py")

So now anybody can access my shared/peter/directory.
shared is a link to a
/srv/shared
directory
It appears that valid path can be appended to the sys.path.
Everyone still has their own directory but there can be a common directory that is shared.

BTW, I am using tljh.

A handy thing to do is to type
jupyter --help
jupyter --paths
Now you can see the directories that tljh uses.

8

Thanks, I will try this one.

To be honest, I was really surprised that Jupyter didn’t give a simple option to sate data on another file server. Unless Jupyter was made for single users only!

9

Jupiter lab is definitely a single user program. Someone had a good idea to make it web based on a remote server. I can’t get too critical about that.
I call this a win and I am willing to wait for improvements.

10

Well, that explains a lot why there is no option to save the data on a separate server.
I guess we will have to look for another notebook. This is also very difficult since aren’t many notebooks for Data Scientist :unamused: