Is there a way to disable saving to checkpoints for Jupyter Notebooks?

Question

I am working in an environment where writing to the disk space with a folder name like .ipynb_checkpoints is disallowed.

Unfortunately, this is Jupyter Notebook's default path for Save and Checkpoint. Is there a way to configure Jupyter Notebook to not use the checkpoint feature or allow a different folder name?

Answer 1

Not exactly an answer to your question, but perhaps close enough.

The path of the checkpoints folder is configurable so you could rename it to something allowed such as "_ipynb_checkpoints", or you could move it to a completely different folder.

You simply have to add

c.FileCheckpoints.checkpoint_dir = '_ipynb_checkpoints'

to jupyter_notebook_config.py

Answer 2

There are couple of ways to stop autosaves.

There is a contrib nbextension called AutoSaveTime if you have installed jupyter-contrib-nbextensions that adds an autosave time configuration on the toolbar of a notebook, just ensure:

"autosavetime/main": true

is set in your notebook.json configuration file.

Alternatively in a Cell, to change the autosave value for the current notebook, you can write:

%autosave 0

Or you can change your custom.js to make this permanent for all notebooks:

define([
    'base/js/namespace',
    'base/js/events'
    ],
    function(IPython, events) {
        events.on("notebook_loaded.Notebook",
            function () {
                IPython.notebook.set_autosave_interval(0);
            }
        );
    }
);

Answer 3

You can uncheck Settings -> AutosaveDocuments to avoid autosave file, but it always create .ipynb_checkpoints folder when you open a file, I can not find a solution to avoid this behavior,there is a way that you can specify a folder to collect all the checkpoint files and delete them together.

1. In jupyterlab, you can use jupyter notebook --generate-config to generate a config file named jupyter_notebook_config.py .
2. Then you can edit this file: c.FileContentsManager.checkpoints_kwargs = {'root_dir': r'D:\'} .

Or you can just use cammand line option

jupyter lab --FileContentsManager.checkpoints_kwargs="root_dir"="D:/"