500 server error using IPython notebook on Windows

Question

I've just done a fresh install of IPython notebook on Windows 7 Professional 64 bit.

The steps I took were:

1. Install Python 3.4.1 from http://python.org
2. > pip install ipython[notebook]
3. > pip install pywin numpy pygments nodeenv

I can open a notebook fine.

However, when I select File > Print Preview or File > Download as HTML I get a 500 server error.

The stack trace is:

2014-08-07 09:44:25.431 [NotebookApp] Loaded template full.tpl
C:\Python34\lib\site-packages\IPython\nbconvert\filters\markdown.py:78: UserWarning: Node.js 0.9.12 or later wasn't found.
Nbconvert will try to use Pandoc instead.
  "Nbconvert will try to use Pandoc instead.")
WARNING:tornado.general:500 GET /nbconvert/html/Users/Tom%20Oakley/Documents/IPython%20test.ipynb?download=false (::1): nbconvert failed: you need to have pywin32 installed for this to work
ERROR:tornado.access:{
  "Dnt": "1",
  "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/36.0.1985.125 Safari/537.36",
  "Referer": "http://localhost:8888/notebooks/Users/Tom%20Oakley/Documents/IPython%20test.ipynb",
  "Host": "localhost:8888",
  "Connection": "keep-alive",
  "Accept-Language": "en-US,en;q=0.8,en-GB;q=0.6",
  "Accept": "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8",
  "Accept-Encoding": "gzip,deflate,sdch"
}
ERROR:tornado.access:500 GET /nbconvert/html/Users/Tom%20Oakley/Documents/IPython%20test.ipynb?download=false (::1) 156.01ms referer=http://localhost:8888/notebooks/Users/Tom%20Oakley/Documents/IPython%20test.ipynb
WARNING:tornado.access:404 GET /favicon.ico (::1) 1.00ms referer=None

Installing node.js and Pandocs did not help.

Any thoughts on how to fix this error?

I've raised it as an issue with the IPython team.

Answer 1

This works:

1. Right-click on the Command Prompt in the Start Menu.
2. Select Run as administrator.
3. Select Yes in the User Account Control dialog.
4. Run ipython notebook in the resulting Command Prompt window.

Basically, it has to be run as administrator for some reason.

Answer 2

From docs: nodeenv (node.js virtual environment) is a tool to create isolated node.js environments. So after installing nodeenv you need to create new node.js environment: https://github.com/ekalinin/nodeenv#basic

Answer 3

I ended up installing Anaconda in the end and that worked.

Answer 4

This may be an answer for the same error message, but a specific case;

If this error message showed up when executing in the ipython notebook, re-installing Anaconda3 did not help my case.

Your Python installation, some reasons, may not have installed nbconvert. I recommend that you install 'pandoc' that converts all kinds of file formats. It works in the command line mode and through ipython notebook file menu, as well. An easiest way to install pandoc in windows, visit the web site below;

http://www.texts.io/support/0004/

Blessings, (a debtor)<><