Jupyter refuses to serve hidden directory (D:\) on windows

Question

I'm trying to launch Jupyter with a base directory being the root of my second hard drive. I used to be able to do that just fine with Ipython 3.x until I upgraded to the latest version.

If I cd to D:\ and type jupyter notebook --debug the end of the trace I get is:

[I 12:15:14.792 NotebookApp] Refusing to serve hidden directory, via 404 Error
[D 12:15:14.792 NotebookApp] Using contents: services/contents
[W 12:15:14.813 NotebookApp] 404 GET /tree (::1) 23.00ms referer=None
[D 12:15:15.062 NotebookApp] 304 GET /custom/custom.css (::1) 152.00ms

I've tried running the command from an elevated command prompt but to no avail.

How can I run jupyter at the root of my D:\ drive on Windows?

Answer 1

As kinverarity advised, any attempt to use the root folder directly will say that it's refusing to serve a hidden directory. If you absolutely must serve from the root folder (but can change how you try to run it), then what you will need to do is to create a symlink folder pointing to the root, so you run it from what it thinks is a folder but it serves files from the root. The following command creates a notebooks symlink:

mklink /D notebooks \

cd into the symlink folder and run jupyter and the error goes away but it's still serving the files from root.

I should point out that you want to make sure you don't have any processes that iterate recursively over all folders on the drive (unless they skip symlinks), otherwise they'll iterate into the notebooks folder, its notebooks folder, etc, and will never complete because it'll get stuck in a loop.