Jupyter Tidbit: Config, data, and runtime paths

February 03, 2019

This post originates from a gist that supports comments and forks.

Summary

You can get a list of standard paths Jupyter tools use for configuration, static assets, and temporary runtime files by running the command jupyter --paths.

Example

When I run jupyter --paths on my laptop, I see the following output:

config:
    /Users/parente/.jupyter
    /Users/parente/miniconda3/envs/jupyter/etc/jupyter
    /usr/local/etc/jupyter
    /etc/jupyter
data:
    /Users/parente/Library/Jupyter
    /Users/parente/miniconda3/envs/jupyter/share/jupyter
    /usr/local/share/jupyter
    /usr/share/jupyter
runtime:
    /Users/parente/Library/Jupyter/runtime

Why is this useful?

You can use the list of paths to locate and troubleshoot errant extensions and configuration values. You can also use the programmatic equivalents (e.g., import jupyter_core.paths in Python, var jp = require('jupyter-paths') in JavaScript) to read/write appropriate configs and data when building your own Jupyter compatible tools.