Can't open Jupyter in browser after merge #4260 | WSL on Windows | "redirect file" method

[raulf2012]

Hello,

I run Jupyter lab from within WSL in Windows 10. I've had a working setup that opened a chrome browser when I run the jupyter lab command.

Below is the contents of my jupyter_notebook_config.py file
jupyter_notebook_config.py:

c = get_config()
c.NotebookApp.browser = 'chrome.exe -incognito --app=%s'
c.NotebookApp.open_browser = True

conda list output:

Old/Working Jupyter Package Info:

    jupyter                   1.0.0                    py36_7
    jupyter_client            5.2.3                    py36_0
    jupyter_console           5.2.0                    py36_1
    jupyter_core              4.4.0                    py36_0
    jupyterlab                0.34.9                   py36_0
    jupyterlab_launcher       0.13.1                   py36_0

New/Broken Jupyter Package Info:

    jupyter                   1.0.0                    py36_7
    jupyter_client            5.2.4                    py36_0
    jupyter_console           6.0.0                    py36_0
    jupyter_core              4.4.0                    py36_0
    jupyterlab                0.35.3                   py36_0
    jupyterlab_server         0.2.0                    py36_0

Before upgrading Jupyter lab this would produce the following terminal output and the browser would open correctly.

The new jupyter set up would produce the following on running jupyter lab:

Which would open the following in a Google Chrome window:

Now obviously this is due to the fact that the WSL file system is not easily accessible by the Windows operating system so the:
/home/raul_surface/.local/share/jupyter/runtime/nbserver-324-open.html file can't be opened

---

Problem/Question

The issue seems to be this new method of opening/accessing the Jupyter window

    To access the notebook, open this file in a browser:
        file:///home/raul_surface/.local/share/jupyter/runtime/nbserver-183-open.html

Which seems to be the default as opposed to using the URL

So how do I force Jupyter lab to try to open the URL by default.

Thank you in advance for your time,
Raul Flores

[jasongrout]

I think this comes from a recent change in the Jupyter notebook package (not JupyterLab). See jupyter/notebook#4260 for discussion, including some discussion at the end on WSL.

[betteridiot]

^ This has potentially cripples 50% of my students' build environments because they are WSL users. For those that got an Xserver working properly, firefox/chrome (from within Linux) can spawn from file.

However, for those that cannot get Xserver working and set the BROWSER variable to a Windows firefox.exe/chrome.exe this completely breaks their build.

The workaround right now is to downgrade notebook to version 5.7.0

[ucgummy]

Same issue on a chromebook; Jupyter must run on a linux vm but the browser cannot access that file system.