Right place to put custom nbconvert templates

Question

I've made a custom nbconvert template and want it to be accessible from any folder where I launch nbconvert utility. Where should I put my template?

I couldn't find anything in official docs. I have already tried usual places for jupyter configs, like /usr/share/jupyter, ~/.local/share/jupyter, ~/.jupyter, to no avail.

The only place I've found so far is the folder where python package lives:

$ pip show nbconvert | grep Location | cut -d" " -f2
/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages

If I create nbconvert/templates/html directory there and put my template in it, nbconvert --to html --template <my_template_name> ... works fine. But this is an ugly hack which I'll need to re-do every time I update nbconvert.

Seems that I can provide nbconvert with environment variable, but I would prefer to avoid this option.

Answer 1

You need to tell nbconvert to look for your template by creating an jupyter_nbconvert_config.py file and storing it in ~/.jupyter.

I use this for LaTeX--here's what my file looks like:

import os
c = get_config()

c.LatexExporter.template_path = ['.', os.path.expanduser('~/.jupyter/templates')]
c.LatexExporter.template_file = 'custom_latex.tplx'

Assuming you template extends an existing one, you need to include '.' when setting template_path so it knows where to look for the standard templates.

Answer 2

From the docs.

The recommended place to save custom templates, so that they are globally accessible to nbconvert, is your jupyter data directories:

• share/jupyter

  • nbconvert
    • templates
      • html
      • latex

Alternately

from jupyter_core.paths import jupyter_path
print(jupyter_path('nbconvert','templates'))