# Jupyterlab extension manager in virtual enironment not working

**URL:** <https://discourse.jupyter.org/t/jupyterlab-extension-manager-in-virtual-enironment-not-working/5047>\
**Category:** JupyterLab\
**Created:** [July 2, 2020, 6:39am UTC](https://discourse.jupyter.org/t/jupyterlab-extension-manager-in-virtual-enironment-not-working/5047 "2020-07-02T06:39:16Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![cmartinotti](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex031/user_avatar/discourse.jupyter.org/cmartinotti/32/5019_2.png) [@cmartinotti](https://discourse.jupyter.org/u/cmartinotti)\
**Post date:** [July 2, 2020, 6:39am UTC](https://discourse.jupyter.org/t/jupyterlab-extension-manager-in-virtual-enironment-not-working/5047/1 "2020-07-02T06:39:16Z")

</div>

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](https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/cli/install) 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.