Fix Jupyter Notebook permission issue on Ubuntu 18.04

“[Error 13] Permission denied”

I reinstalled Jupyter Notebook recently. However, there’s an issue saying my saving file action was denied. I searched the internet and finally came up with a way to fix this common error.

Unexpected error while saving file: Untitled.ipynb [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/home/danni/.local/share/jupyter/notebook_secret'

First I checked GitHub and Stack Overflow posts. There are several threads stating the error is about. It seems that the Jupyter data files are owned by root and therefore your user may not write to them. This is most probably the case because you ran Jupyter as root.

Run sudo chown -R sura:sura /home/sura/.local/share/jupyter and test if it works now. If it still does not work, check the error message. After the term “permission denied” is a path. Check the permissions of that path (ls -l <path>) and if the file or directory belongs to root, change then owner (sudo chown -R sura:sura <path>).

Afterwards, never run Jupyter as root, always as your user.

(venv) danni@danni-pc:~/Dropbox/CS/jupyter$ sudo chown -R danni:danni ~/.local/share/jupyter

Installation

For setting up the Jupyter Notebook I referred to this post from Digital Ocean. For fixing the issue I referred to this post on Stack Exchange.