Jupyter Notebook 500 : Internal Server Error

Question

I want to learn how to use Jupyter Notebook. So far, I have managed to download and install it (using pip), but I'm having trouble opening it.

I am opening it by typing:

jupyter notebook

in my terminal. It opens in my browser, with the URL:

http://localhost:8888/tree

and I just get a big:

500 : Internal Server Error

message. Could someone point me in the right direction of what's going wrong please?

The full error message in my terminal:

[E 17:53:52.034 NotebookApp] Uncaught exception GET /tree (::1)
    HTTPServerRequest(protocol='http', host='localhost:8888', method='GET', uri='/tree', version='HTTP/1.1', remote_ip='::1', headers={'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.8,es;q=0.6', 'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip, deflate, sdch', 'Host': 'localhost:8888', 'Accept': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8', 'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.112 Safari/537.36', 'Connection': 'keep-alive', 'Upgrade-Insecure-Requests': '1'})
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/tornado/web.py", line 1443, in _execute
        result = method(*self.path_args, **self.path_kwargs)
      File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/tornado/web.py", line 2800, in wrapper
        return method(self, *args, **kwargs)
      File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/notebook/tree/handlers.py", line 50, in get
        terminals_available=self.settings['terminals_available'],
      File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/notebook/base/handlers.py", line 302, in render_template
        template = self.get_template(name)
      File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/notebook/base/handlers.py", line 298, in get_template
        return self.settings['jinja2_env'].get_template(name)
      File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Jinja2-2.6-py2.7.egg/jinja2/environment.py", line 719, in get_template
        return self._load_template(name, self.make_globals(globals))
      File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Jinja2-2.6-py2.7.egg/jinja2/environment.py", line 693, in _load_template
        template = self.loader.load(self, name, globals)
      File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Jinja2-2.6-py2.7.egg/jinja2/loaders.py", line 127, in load
        code = environment.compile(source, name, filename)
      File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Jinja2-2.6-py2.7.egg/jinja2/environment.py", line 493, in compile
        self.handle_exception(exc_info, source_hint=source)
      File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/notebook/templates/tree.html", line 8, in template
        data-base-url="{{base_url | urlencode}}"
    TemplateAssertionError: no filter named 'urlencode'
[E 17:53:52.819 NotebookApp] {
      "Accept-Language": "en-US,en;q=0.8,es;q=0.6",
      "Accept-Encoding": "gzip, deflate, sdch",
      "Host": "localhost:8888",
      "Accept": "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8",
      "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.112 Safari/537.36",
      "Connection": "keep-alive",
      "Upgrade-Insecure-Requests": "1"
    }
[E 17:53:52.819 NotebookApp] 500 GET /tree (::1) 874.29ms referer=None

---

EDIT

When attempting to update ipython as advised, the following error message was produced:

Exception:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/basecommand.py", line 209, in main
    status = self.run(options, args)
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/commands/install.py", line 317, in run
    prefix=options.prefix_path,
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/req/req_set.py", line 732, in install
    **kwargs
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/req/req_install.py", line 835, in install
    self.move_wheel_files(self.source_dir, root=root, prefix=prefix)
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/req/req_install.py", line 1030, in move_wheel_files
    isolated=self.isolated,
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/wheel.py", line 247, in move_wheel_files
    prefix=prefix,
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/locations.py", line 142, in distutils_scheme
    i = d.get_command_obj('install', create=True)
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/distutils/dist.py", line 845, in get_command_obj
    klass = self.get_command_class(command)
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/setuptools/dist.py", line 430, in get_command_class
    self.cmdclass[command] = cmdclass = ep.load()
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 2229, in load
    return self.resolve()
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 2235, in resolve
    module = __import__(self.module_name, fromlist=['__name__'], level=0)
ImportError: No module named command.install

Answer 1

A simple solution that worked for me: on the terminal, run the following command -

jupyter troubleshoot | grep jupyter | grep /

This will list the path to the different versions of jupyter that are installed in your computer. Try all the versions one by one and delete the binaries of the ones that give you the 500 error. Then you might want to change the link to jupyter by adding a line (alias jupyter="/usr/local/bin/jupyter") to your ~/.bashrc file or call jupyter with the absolute path.

Note: this is not the cleanest solution, but one that works.

Answer 2

Works for me by upgrade the nbconvert package. pip install --upgrade --user nbconvert

Answer 3

After trying all the solutions on this page without success, a variation of @kruger answer is what worked for me, simply this:

pip install --upgrade nbconvert

Answer 4

I had the same problem and was a bit painful until I managed to fix it. The magic line the worked for me was

conda install -c conda-forge jupyter_contrib_nbextensions 

Answer 5

I had this issue as of 22/03/2019, and what worked for me was updating conda and then upgrading jupyter using pip:

conda update --all
pip install jupyter --upgrade

Answer 6

This error is due to inconsistencies. Updating jupyter solves the issue. Use the following command if you are using Anaconda- conda update jupyter