Overview

A JupyterLab workspace contains the state of JupyterLab, including files that are currently open and tab layout. JupyterLab allows using URLs to manage workspaces. For more information about JupyterLab URLs, please see the official JupyterLab documentation.

This article demonstrates how to use URLs to reset a JupyterLab workspace in IDAS. This is helpful if, for example, you open a CSV file in IDAS, and the file doesn’t load completely. Your JupyterLab workspace might become unresponsive and look as follows.

Open

After a few minutes, the page might crash:

Open

The steps below will demonstrate how to resolve this issue.

Steps to Reset a JupyterLab Workspace

1. Log in to IDAS at https://notebooks.hpc.uiowa.edu/. Select either “Interactive Research” or your class instance.

2. If you have made changes to a Jupyter Notebook document and need to save your changes, follow the steps below. If you do not need to save changes to any notebook, skip to step 3.

2a. Open Jupyter Hub in IDAS

The default URL for JupyterLab ends with “lab”, as shown in the screenshot below.

In the URL, change “lab” to “tree” and press “Enter”. The page will refresh and open Jupyter Hub:

2b. In Jupyter Hub, you can manage your notebooks as needed.

To view a list of notebooks that are currently running, click the "Running" tab:

2c. Under “Notebooks”, click on the name of the notebook that you'd like to save.

2d. Click on the "Save and Checkpoint" icon to save any changes to the notebook.

Repeat as needed for any other running notebooks that you want to save.

3. Return to the Jupyter Hub page. At this point, the URL will end with “tree#running”:

Edit the URL to replace “tree#running” with “lab?clone=foo” and press Enter. This will clone a non-existent workspace (called foo) into your default JupyterLab workspace, so that you can start JupyterLab with a blank slate.

Contact

If you have any questions or comments, please contact research-computing@uiowa.edu.