Common Directories and File Locations¶

Configuration files¶

Config files are stored by default in the ~/.jupyter directory.

JUPYTER_CONFIG_DIR¶

Set this environment variable to use a particular directory, other than the default, for Jupyter config files.

Besides the user config directory mentioned above, Jupyter has a search path of additional locations from which a config file will be loaded. Here’s a table of the locations to be searched, in order of preference:

Data files¶

Jupyter uses a search path to find installable data files, such as kernelspecs and notebook extensions. When searching for a resource, the code will search the search path starting at the first directory until it finds where the resource is contained.

Each category of file is in a subdirectory of each directory of the search path. For example, kernel specs are in kernels subdirectories.

JUPYTER_PATH¶

Set this environment variable to provide extra directories for the data search path. JUPYTER_PATH should contain a series of directories, separated by os.pathsep (; on Windows, : on Unix). Directories given in JUPYTER_PATH are searched before other locations.

Runtime files¶

Things like connection files, which are only useful for the lifetime of a particular process, have a runtime directory.

On Linux and other free desktop platforms, these runtime files are stored in $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/jupyter by default. On other platforms, it’s a runtime/ subdirectory of the user’s data directory (second row of the table above).

An environment variable may also be used to set the runtime directory.

JUPYTER_RUNTIME_DIR¶

Set this to override where Jupyter stores runtime files.

Summary¶

JUPYTER_CONFIG_DIR for config file location

JUPYTER_PATH for datafile directory locations

JUPYTER_RUNTIME_DIR for runtime file location