Jupyter Notebook: Access to the file was denied

Question

I'm trying to run a Jupyter notebook on Ubuntu 21.10. I've installed python, jupyter notebook, and all the various prerequisites. I added export PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin to my bashrc so that the command jupyter notebook would be operational from the terminal.

When I call jupyter notebook from the terminal, I get the following error message from my browser:

Access to the file was denied.

The file at /home/username/.local/share/jupyter/runtime/nbserver-260094-open.html is not readable.

    It may have been removed, moved, or file permissions may be preventing access.

I'm using the latest version of FireFox.

I've read a number of guides on this and it seems to be a permissions error, but none of the guides that I've used have resolved the issue. Using sudo does not help, in fact it causes Exception: Jupyter command "jupyter-notebook" not found. to be thrown.

That being said, I am still able to access the notebook server. If I go to the terminal and instead click on the localhost:8888 or IP address of the notebook server then it takes me to the notebook and everything runs without issue.

I would like to solve this so that when I run jupyter notebook I'm taken to the server and don't need to go back to the terminal window and click the IP address. It's inconvenient and can slow me down if I'm running multiple notebooks at once.

Any help on this issue would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

I had the same problem.

Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS Chromium Version 96.0.4664.110

This was the solution in my case:

Create the configuration file with this command:

jupyter notebook --generate-config

Edit the configuration file ~/.jupyter/jupyter_notebook_config.py and set:

c.NotebookApp.use_redirect_file = False

Make sure that this configuration parameter starts at the beginning of the line. If you leave one space at the beginning of the line, you will get the message that access to the file was denied.

Otherwise you can clean and reinstall JupyterLab

jupyter lab clean --all
pip3 install jupyterlab --force-reinstall