Install `jupyter_contrib_nbextensions` Package (a collection of extensions) for Python Jupyter Notebook

Jul. 15, 2024

Introduction

It is an officially recommended way to install Python Jupyter Notebook by command pip install notebook¹ as introduced in blog². However, after installing it, when I tried to install jupyter_contrib_nbextensions package³ and configure settings to access some Notebook extensions, some unexpected errors occurred. The main reason is that command pip install notebook will install the latest Jupyter Notebook release by default, i.e. 7.2.1 on July 2024, and jupyter_contrib_nbextensions haven’t adapted well to 7.x-version Jupyter Notebook as introduced in its GitHub repository¹:

Maintained versions

We maintain the two most recently released major versions of Jupyter Notebook, Classic Notebook v6 and Notebook v7. Notebook v5 is no longer maintained. All Notebook v5 users are strongly advised to upgrade to Classic Notebook v6 as soon as possible.

Upgrading to Notebook v7 may require more work, if you use custom extensions, as extensions written for Notebook v5 or Classic Notebook v6 are not compatible with Notebook v7.

Notebook v7

The newest major version of Notebook is based on:

JupyterLab components for the frontend
Jupyter Server for the Python server

This represents a significant change to the jupyter/notebook code base.

To learn more about Notebook v7: https://jupyter.org/enhancement-proposals/79-notebook-v7/notebook-v7.html

Classic Notebook v6

Maintenance and security-related issues only are now being addressed in the 6.5.x branch. It depends on nbclassic for the HTML/JavaScript/CSS assets.

New features and continuous improvement is now focused on Notebook v7 (see section above).

If you have an open pull request with a new feature or if you were planning to open one, we encourage switching over to the Jupyter Server and JupyterLab architecture, and distribute it as a server extension and / or JupyterLab prebuilt extension. That way your new feature will also be compatible with the new Notebook v7.

So, to use jupyter_contrib_nbextensions, we should install the Jupyter Notebook whose version is lower than 7. The complete code to install Jupyter Notebook dependencies, jupyter_contrib_nbextensions, and make them compatible shows as follows:

pip install notebook<7
pip install jupyter_nbextensions_configurator
pip install jupyter_contrib_nbextensions
jupyter contrib nbextension install --user
pip install jupyter-server<2

They are enough to reach the goal in a new Python virtual environment. And in the following text, I’ll describe them in detail.

Step by step

At the beginning, I installed Jupyter Notebook by²:

pip install notebook
pip install jupyter_nbextensions_configurator

and install jupyter_contrib_nbextensions and configure it by³:

pip install jupyter_contrib_nbextensions
jupyter contrib nbextension install --user

However, there’s an error occurring when I executed jupyter contrib nbextension install --user:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\jupyter_contrib_core\notebook_compat\nbextensions.py", line 6, in <module>
    from notebook.extensions import BaseExtensionApp
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'notebook.extensions'

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\jupyter_contrib_core\notebook_compat\nbextensions.py", line 10, in <module>
    from notebook.nbextensions import BaseNBExtensionApp
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'notebook.nbextensions'

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<frozen runpy>", line 198, in _run_module_as_main
  File "<frozen runpy>", line 88, in _run_code
  File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Scripts\jupyter-contrib.EXE\__main__.py", line 7, in <module>
  File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\jupyter_core\application.py", line 283, in launch_instance
    super().launch_instance(argv=argv, **kwargs)
  File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\traitlets\config\application.py", line 1073, in launch_instance
    app = cls.instance(**kwargs)
          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\traitlets\config\configurable.py", line 583, in instance
    inst = cls(*args, **kwargs)
           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\jupyter_contrib_core\application.py", line 27, in __init__
    self._refresh_subcommands()
  File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\jupyter_contrib_core\application.py", line 43, in _refresh_subcommands
    get_subcommands_dict = entrypoint.load()
                           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\pkg_resources\__init__.py", line 2471, in load
    return self.resolve()
           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\pkg_resources\__init__.py", line 2477, in resolve
    module = __import__(self.module_name, fromlist=['__name__'], level=0)
             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\jupyter_contrib_nbextensions\application.py", line 7, in <module>
    from jupyter_contrib_core.notebook_compat.nbextensions import ArgumentConflict
  File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\jupyter_contrib_core\notebook_compat\nbextensions.py", line 12, in <module>
    from ._compat.nbextensions import BaseNBExtensionApp
  File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\jupyter_contrib_core\notebook_compat\_compat\nbextensions.py", line 35, in <module>
    from notebook.nbextensions import (
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'notebook.nbextensions'

which points out that module notebook.nbextensions lacks.

At this time, the version of installed Jupyter Notebook is 7.2.1:

pip show notebook

(mmy_venv) PS G:\Spyder\Python311> pip show notebook
Name: notebook
Version: 7.2.1
Summary: Jupyter Notebook - A web-based notebook environment for interactive computing
Home-page:
Author:
Author-email: Jupyter Development Team <jupyter@googlegroups.com>
License: BSD 3-Clause License

- Copyright (c) 2001-2015, IPython Development Team
- Copyright (c) 2015-, Jupyter Development Team

All rights reserved.

......

and I can launch Notebook by jupyter notebook although there’s no Nbextensions tab on toolbar:

As mentioned before, this is because notebook and jupyter_contrib_nbextensions have a dependency conflict⁴, and we should downgrade Jupyter Notebook by⁵:

pip install notebook<7

At this time, Notebook version is 6.5.7:

pip show notebook

Name: notebook
Version: 6.5.7
Summary: A web-based notebook environment for interactive computing
Home-page: http://jupyter.org
Author: Jupyter Development Team
Author-email: jupyter@googlegroups.com
License: BSD
Location: G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages
Requires: argon2-cffi, ipykernel, ipython-genutils, jinja2, jupyter-client, jupyter-core, nbclassic, nbconvert, nbformat, nest-asyncio, prometheus-client, pyzmq, Send2Trash, terminado, tornado, traitlets
Required-by: jupyter_contrib_core, jupyter_contrib_nbextensions, jupyter_nbextensions_configurator

now if I run jupyter contrib nbextension install --user again, there will be no error during this process.

Now, when I launch Jupyter Notebook, there exists Nbextensions tab:

However at this moment, every operation in Jupyter Notebook is forbidden:

And it prompts that I should input password or token:

At the same time, there are some error and warning messages printed on PowerShell host:

[W 16:12:13.447 NotebookApp] Error loading server extension jupyterlab
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\notebook\notebookapp.py", line 2050, in init_server_extensions
        func(self)
      File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\jupyterlab\serverextension.py", line 71, in load_jupyter_server_extension
        extension.initialize()
      File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\jupyterlab\labapp.py", line 923, in initialize
        super().initialize()
      File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\jupyter_server\extension\application.py", line 437, in initialize
        self._prepare_handlers()
      File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\jupyter_server\extension\application.py", line 327, in _prepare_handlers
        self.initialize_handlers()
      File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\jupyterlab\labapp.py", line 737, in initialize_handlers
        page_config["token"] = self.serverapp.identity_provider.token
                               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
    AttributeError: 'NotebookApp' object has no attribute 'identity_provider'

and

[C 16:12:13.494 NotebookApp]

    To access the notebook, open this file in a browser:
        file:///C:/Users/whatastarrynight/AppData/Roaming/jupyter/runtime/nbserver-17600-open.html
    Or copy and paste one of these URLs:
        http://localhost:8888/?token=a78eb94xxx
     or http://127.0.0.1:8888/?token=a78eb94xxx
G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\jupyter_server\base\handlers.py:608: UserWarning: The Tornado web application does not have an 'identity_provider' defined in its settings. In future releases of jupyter_server, this will be a required key for all subclasses of `JupyterHandler`. For an example, see the jupyter_server source code for how to add an identity provider to the tornado settings: https://github.com/jupyter-server/jupyter_server/blob/v2.0.0/jupyter_server/serverapp.py#L242
  if type(self.identity_provider) is IdentityProvider and mod_obj.__name__ != __name__:

and

[W 16:12:15.682 NotebookApp] [jupyter_nbextensions_configurator] wrote error: 'Forbidden'
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\tornado\web.py", line 1769, in _execute
        result = await result  # type: ignore
                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^
      File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\jupyter_server\base\handlers.py", line 751, in prepare
        await super().prepare()
      File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\jupyter_server\base\handlers.py", line 643, in prepare
        return web.authenticated(lambda _: super().prepare())(self)
               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
      File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\tornado\web.py", line 3289, in wrapper
        url = self.get_login_url()
              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
      File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\jupyter_server\base\handlers.py", line 783, in get_login_url
        raise web.HTTPError(403)
    tornado.web.HTTPError: HTTP 403: Forbidden

I think it’s easy to solve it by inputing the token in the message into the input box in the figure, but it doesn’t work and I don’t know why. I tried some methods introduced in some on-line references, and finally found one of them works, that is downgrade jupyter-server module⁶.

Before downgrading, jupyter-server is 2.14.2:

pip show jupyter-server

Name: jupyter_server
Version: 2.14.2
Summary: The backend—i.e. core services, APIs, and REST endpoints—to Jupyter web applications.
Home-page:
Author:
Author-email: Jupyter Development Team <jupyter@googlegroups.com>
License: BSD 3-Clause License

- Copyright (c) 2001-2015, IPython Development Team
- Copyright (c) 2015-, Jupyter Development Team

All rights reserved.

... ...

and we should downgrade it to lower than 2.x version:

pip install jupyter-server<2

During downgrading, there’s an error thrown:

ERROR: pip's dependency resolver does not currently take into account all the packages that are installed. This behaviour is the source of the following dependency conflicts.
jupyterlab 4.2.3 requires jupyter-server<3,>=2.4.0, but you have jupyter-server 1.24.0 which is incompatible.

This error will be mentioned in the In closing part.

At this time, jupyter-server is 1.24.0:

pip show jupyter-server

Name: jupyter-server
Version: 1.24.0
Summary: The backend—i.e. core services, APIs, and REST endpoints—to Jupyter web applications.
Home-page: https://jupyter-server.readthedocs.io
Author: Jupyter Development Team
Author-email: jupyter@googlegroups.com
License:
Location: G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages
Requires: anyio, argon2-cffi, jinja2, jupyter-client, jupyter-core, nbconvert, nbformat, packaging, prometheus-client, pywinpty, pyzmq, Send2Trash, terminado, tornado, traitlets, websocket-client
Required-by: jupyter-lsp, jupyter_nbextensions_configurator, jupyterlab, jupyterlab_server, notebook_shim

After this step, I can launch Jupyter Notebook and use it with extensions normally, and those forbidden messages disappear:

However, there’s an error when running command jupyter notebook:

[W 16:24:19.202 NotebookApp] Error loading server extension jupyterlab
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\notebook\notebookapp.py", line 2050, in init_server_extensions
        func(self)
      File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\jupyterlab\serverextension.py", line 71, in load_jupyter_server_extension
        extension.initialize()
      File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\jupyterlab\labapp.py", line 923, in initialize
        super().initialize()
      File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\jupyter_server\extension\application.py", line 421, in initialize
        self._prepare_handlers()
      File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\jupyter_server\extension\application.py", line 311, in _prepare_handlers
        self.initialize_handlers()
      File "G:\Spyder\Python311\mmy_venv\Lib\site-packages\jupyterlab\labapp.py", line 737, in initialize_handlers
        page_config["token"] = self.serverapp.identity_provider.token
                               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
    AttributeError: 'NotebookApp' object has no attribute 'identity_provider'

This error will be mentioned in the In closing part as well.

In closing

To sum up, to make package jupyter_contrib_nbextensions available for Jupyter Notebook, I used following commands one by one:

pip install notebook
pip install jupyter_nbextensions_configurator
pip install jupyter_contrib_nbextensions
pip install notebook<7
jupyter contrib nbextension install --user
pip install jupyter-server<2

and make it more concise, we have:

pip install notebook<7
pip install jupyter_nbextensions_configurator
pip install jupyter_contrib_nbextensions
jupyter contrib nbextension install --user
pip install jupyter-server<2

that is directly installing 6.x-version Jupyter Notebook at the beginning (Command set 3 and Command set 1 in Introduction are one and the same).

I respectively execute two command sets , Command set 2 and Command set 3, in two newly created virtual environments (by venv module), and get the packages lists showed in Appendix. It can be seen that:

All packages installed by Command set 3 are the same as that by Command set 2;
Command set 2 introduce 13 extra packages (those marked in bold right in Appendix), i.e. async-lru, Babel, certifi, charset-normalizer, h11, httpcore, httpx, json5, jupyter-lsp, jupyterlab, jupyterlab_server, requests, and urllib3. They are most likely the dependencies of 7.x-version Jupyter Notebook.

So, a takeaway is that, if we downgrade a certain package, its dependencies seem not be influenced correspondingly, at least those extra modules won’t be uninstalled automatically at this case. As a result, some package conflicts will appear. For example, two errors showed before, Error message 1 and Error message 2, are both caused by jupyter_server module, which is one of 7.x-version Jupyter Notebook dependencies: if I execute Command set 3 instead, these two errors won’t show up.

Appendix

Command set 2 (101 packages)	Version	Command set 1 (or 3) (88 packages)	Version
(1) `anyio`	3.7.1	(1) `anyio`	3.7.1
(2) `argon2-cffi`	23.1.0	(2) `argon2-cffi`	23.1.0
(3) `argon2-cffi-bindings`	21.2.0	(3) `argon2-cffi-bindings`	21.2.0
(4) `arrow`	1.3.0	(4) `arrow`	1.3.0
(5) `asttokens`	2.4.1	(5) `asttokens`	2.4.1
(6) async-lru	2.0.4
(7) `attrs`	23.2.0	(6) `attrs`	23.2.0
(8) Babel	2.15.0
(9) `beautifulsoup4`	4.12.3	(7) `beautifulsoup4`	4.12.3
(10) `bleach`	6.1.0	(8) `bleach`	6.1.0
(11) certifi	2024.7.4
(12) `cffi`	1.16.0	(9) `cffi`	1.16.0
(13) charset-normalizer	3.3.2
(14) `colorama`	0.4.6	(10) `colorama`	0.4.6
(15) `comm`	0.2.2	(11) `comm`	0.2.2
(16) `debugpy`	1.8.2	(12) `debugpy`	1.8.2
(17) `decorator`	5.1.1	(13) `decorator`	5.1.1
(18) `defusedxml`	0.7.1	(14) `defusedxml`	0.7.1
(19) `entrypoints`	0.4	(15) `entrypoints`	0.4
(20) `executing`	2.0.1	(16) `executing`	2.0.1
(21) `fastjsonschema`	2.20.0	(17) `fastjsonschema`	2.20.0
(22) `fqdn`	1.5.1	(18) `fqdn`	1.5.1
(23) h11	0.14.0
(24) httpcore	1.0.5
(25) httpx	0.27.0
(26) `idna`	3.7	(19) `idna`	3.7
(27) `ipykernel`	6.29.5	(20) `ipykernel`	6.29.5
(28) `ipython`	8.26.0	(21) `ipython`	8.26.0
(29) `ipython-genutils`	0.2.0	(22) `ipython-genutils`	0.2.0
(30) `isoduration`	20.11.0	(23) `isoduration`	20.11.0
(31) `jedi`	0.19.1	(24) `jedi`	0.19.1
(32) `Jinja2`	3.1.4	(25) `Jinja2`	3.1.4
(33) json5	0.9.25
(34) `jsonpointer`	3.0.0	(26) `jsonpointer`	3.0.0
(35) `jsonschema`	4.23.0	(27) `jsonschema`	4.23.0
(36) `jsonschema-specifications`	2023.12.1	(28) `jsonschema-specifications`	2023.12.1
(37) `jupyter_client`	7.4.9	(29) `jupyter_client`	7.4.9
(38) `jupyter_contrib_core`	0.4.2	(30) `jupyter_contrib_core`	0.4.2
(39) `jupyter_contrib_nbextensions`	0.7.0	(31) `jupyter_contrib_nbextensions`	0.7.0
(40) `jupyter_core`	5.7.2	(32) `jupyter_core`	5.7.2
(41) `jupyter-events`	0.10.0	(33) `jupyter-events`	0.10.0
(42) `jupyter-highlight-selected-word`	0.2.0	(34) `jupyter-highlight-selected-word`	0.2.0
(43) jupyter-lsp	2.2.5
(44) `jupyter_nbextensions_configurator`	0.6.4	(35) `jupyter_nbextensions_configurator`	0.6.4
(45) `jupyter-server`	1.24.0	(36) `jupyter-server`	1.24.0
(46) `jupyter_server_terminals`	0.5.3	(37) `jupyter_server_terminals`	0.5.3
(47) jupyterlab	4.2.3
(48) `jupyterlab_pygments`	0.3.0	(38) `jupyterlab_pygments`	0.3.0
(49) jupyterlab_server	2.27.2
(50) `lxml`	5.2.2	(39) `lxml`	5.2.2
(51) `MarkupSafe`	2.1.5	(40) `MarkupSafe`	2.1.5
(52) `matplotlib-inline`	0.1.7	(41) `matplotlib-inline`	0.1.7
(53) `mistune`	3.0.2	(42) `mistune`	3.0.2
(54) `nbclassic`	1.1.0	(43) `nbclassic`	1.1.0
(55) `nbclient`	0.10.0	(44) `nbclient`	0.10.0
(56) `nbconvert`	7.16.4	(45) `nbconvert`	7.16.4
(57) `nbformat`	5.10.4	(46) `nbformat`	5.10.4
(58) `nest-asyncio`	1.6.0	(47) `nest-asyncio`	1.6.0
(59) `notebook`	6.5.7	(48) `notebook`	6.5.7
(60) `notebook_shim`	0.2.4	(49) `notebook_shim`	0.2.4
(61) `overrides`	7.7.0	(50) `overrides`	7.7.0
(62) `packaging`	24.1	(51) `packaging`	24.1
(63) `pandocfilters`	1.5.1	(52) `pandocfilters`	1.5.1
(64) `parso`	0.8.4	(53) `parso`	0.8.4
(65) `pip`	24.0	(54) `pip`	24.0
(66) `platformdirs`	4.2.2	(55) `platformdirs`	4.2.2
(67) `prometheus_client`	0.20.0	(56) `prometheus_client`	0.20.0
(68) `prompt_toolkit`	3.0.47	(57) `prompt_toolkit`	3.0.47
(69) `psutil`	6.0.0	(58) `psutil`	6.0.0
(70) `pure-eval`	0.2.2	(59) `pure-eval`	0.2.2
(71) `pycparser`	2.22	(60) `pycparser`	2.22
(72) `Pygments`	2.18.0	(61) `Pygments`	2.18.0
(73) `python-dateutil`	2.9.0.post0	(62) `python-dateutil`	2.9.0.post0
(74) `python-json-logger`	2.0.7	(63) `python-json-logger`	2.0.7
(75) `pywin32`	306	(64) `pywin32`	306
(76) `pywinpty`	2.0.13	(65) `pywinpty`	2.0.13
(77) `PyYAML`	6.0.1	(66) `PyYAML`	6.0.1
(78) `pyzmq`	26.0.3	(67) `pyzmq`	26.0.3
(79) `referencing`	0.35.1	(68) `referencing`	0.35.1
(80) requests	2.32.3
(81) `rfc3339-validator`	0.1.4	(69) `rfc3339-validator`	0.1.4
(82) `rfc3986-validator`	0.1.1	(70) `rfc3986-validator`	0.1.1
(83) `rpds-py`	0.19.0	(71) `rpds-py`	0.19.0
(84) `Send2Trash`	1.8.3	(72) `Send2Trash`	1.8.3
(85) `setuptools`	65.5.0	(73) `setuptools`	65.5.0
(86) `six`	1.16.0	(74) `six`	1.16.0
(87) `sniffio`	1.3.1	(75) `sniffio`	1.3.1
(88) `soupsieve`	2.5	(76) `soupsieve`	2.5
(89) `stack-data`	0.6.3	(77) `stack-data`	0.6.3
(90) `terminado`	0.18.1	(78) `terminado`	0.18.1
(91) `tinycss2`	1.3.0	(79) `tinycss2`	1.3.0
(92) `tornado`	6.4.1	(80) `tornado`	6.4.1
(93) `traitlets`	5.14.3	(81) `traitlets`	5.14.3
(94) `types-python-dateutil`	2.9.0.20240316	(82) `types-python-dateutil`	2.9.0.20240316
(95) `typing_extensions`	4.12.2	(83) `typing_extensions`	4.12.2
(96) `uri-template`	1.3.0	(84) `uri-template`	1.3.0
(97) urllib3	2.2.2
(98) `wcwidth`	0.2.13	(85) `wcwidth`	0.2.13
(99) `webcolors`	24.6.0	(86) `webcolors`	24.6.0
(100) `webencodings`	0.5.1	(87) `webencodings`	0.5.1
(101) `websocket-client`	1.8.0	(88) `websocket-client`	1.8.0

References