Jupyterlab extension manager in virtual enironment not working

Hello everyone, I’m having trobule switching from jupyter notebook to jupyterlab. This is partly due to the virtual environment setup i guess, i use conda to manage my venv, but my base environment screwed up badly and I don’t exactly know how to fix it, so I set up a new venv called base_2.7

Now i managed to set up everything to get jupyterlab going in base_2.7, but if i try to use extensions i have troubles. First thing first i get no “activate” extension button in my command section, i had to manually go in the options on the extension manager section and overwrite the enable:false with enable:true

on base_2.7 i have nodejs installed, (installed with conda install nodejs) and it’s version 9.11.1
when i try to install the toc extension from the now enabled jupyterlab extension tab though it asks me to build the extension and tit prome this error:

error get-caller-file@2.0.5: The engine “node” is incompatible with this module. Expected version “6.* || 8.* || >= 10.*”.
error Found incompatible module
info Visit yarn install | Yarn for documentation about this command.
node /home/carlo/programs/anaconda2/envs/base_2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/jupyterlab/staging/yarn.js run build:prod
yarn run v1.6.0
$ webpack --config webpack.prod.config.js
/bin/sh: 1: webpack: not found
error Command failed with exit code 127.

So i think it’s just the version of node, and then i try to conda upgrade node. This though ended up changing my version of jupyterlab to jupyterlab-0.27.0 and now jupyterlab didn’t work anymore, at launch it would open a blank page on my browser saying Cannot find template: “index.html” .

So I tryed to upgrade jupyterlab with conda upgrade jupyterlab, which restored jupyterlab but also restored node to the version 9.11.1.

How do i exit this terrible loop? Also can i change the default working directory of jupyterlab? What i mean is this:

the output from my jupyter lab path in base environment or in my base_2.7 environment is this:
Application directory: /home/carlo/programs/anaconda2/share/jupyter/lab
User Settings directory: /home/carlo/.jupyter/lab/user-settings
Workspaces directory /home/carlo/.jupyter/lab/workspaces

the output of my jupyter lab path in my base_2.7 environment if I remove /home/carlo/programs/anaconda2/bin from my PATH is this:
Application directory: /home/carlo/programs/anaconda2/envs/base_2.7/share/jupyter/lab
User Settings directory: /home/carlo/.jupyter/lab/user-settings

I would want jupyterlab to be contained only in my base_2.7 environment, as the base env is totally screwed up.

If you want any more info ask me please, thanks in advance for your time.