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

I had the same problem and my solution was update the Jinja2 package to version Jinja2-2.8.

To update it I used the easy_install command as follow:

sudo easy_install -U python-jinja2[all]

After that the 500 : Internal Server Error was fixed.

Answer 2

I also encountered this problem. The root cause in my case was that I already had Jinja2 installed with root permissions (having used sudo pip install before I knew better).

My solution was to uninstall Jinja2 with sudo pip uninstall (which was required because it was installed with root permissions), and re-run pip install jupyter to reinstall it with regular user permissions.

$ sudo pip uninstall Jinja2
$ pip install jupyter

While using sudo to install works here, it makes the problem worse in the longer term because all its packages are installed with root permissions, leading to further problems like this in future with other packages. It's kind of like kicking that can down the road.

Many won't care of course, as long as it works. But for those that do I thought I'd mention.

There's no way to know for sure what the offending package is, but it's likely to be one of those in the stack trace. I noticed Jinja2 as one I vaguely remembered from my early days in Python so I started there and it worked.

Answer 3

Use this ::

python2 -m pip install ipykernel
python2 -m ipykernel install --user

python3 -m pip install ipykernel
python3 -m ipykernel install --user

Answer 4

Was having a similar problem. Fixed it after upgrading ipython with this command

sudo pip install --upgrade "ipython[all]"

Note: make sure to type ipython with double quotes and [all]

Answer 5

try upgrading jupyter hub first

pip install --upgrade jupyterhub


pip install --upgrade --user nbconvert

worked for me on windows 10 as well.