Collaborative Jupyter Lab not working

[igor-semyonov]

I am having trouble with real-time collaborative mode.

I did the following:

python -m venv ~/venv/jupyter
. ~/v4v/jupyter/bin/activate
pip install -U pip
pip install jupyterlab
pip install jupyter_collaboration
jupyter lab --collaborative --no-browser

I thin copied the URL in the jupyter startup output and opened it in 2 browsers.
I opened the same file in both client windows.
I am not getting any of the claimed collaborative functionality.
I only see changes made by the other 'client' by reloading the page.

I am doing this on Linux with
python version 3.11.4
jupyterlab version 4.0.2
jupyter_collaboration version 1.0.1

[welcome]

Thank you for opening your first issue in this project! Engagement like this is essential for open source projects! 🤗

If you haven't done so already, check out Jupyter's Code of Conduct. Also, please try to follow the issue template as it helps other other community members to contribute more effectively.

You can meet the other Jovyans by joining our Discourse forum. There is also an intro thread there where you can stop by and say Hi! 👋

Welcome to the Jupyter community! 🎉

[welcome]

Thank you for opening your first issue in this project! Engagement like this is essential for open source projects! 🤗

If you haven't done so already, check out Jupyter's Code of Conduct. Also, please try to follow the issue template as it helps other other community members to contribute more effectively.

You can meet the other Jovyans by joining our Discourse forum. There is also an intro thread there where you can stop by and say Hi! 👋

Welcome to the Jupyter community! 🎉

[maximerischard]

Same problem here. This is on a recent install with no other extensions. It's hard to provide a good bug report, there's no error or anything. I tried with both Firefox and Chrome. The only hint I could find is this error in the console (which could be a red herring).

[maximerischard]

I was able to get it to work for me.

Since I had just installed the extension, I was trying it out on a notebook that I already had opened in jupyterlab. I of course tried restarting the jupyterlab server and reloading the front-end multiple times, to no avail. Then I found that when I tried it out in a new 'Untitled.ipynb' notebook, it worked just fine. I noticed the Untitled notebook had "RTC:" prepended in the URL, whereas my already-opened notebook did not (despite reloading it multiple times, I think jupyterlab keeps some state in the background). By closing the notebook (closing the tab within jupyterlab, not just closing the jupyterlab tab in the browser) and reopening it, I was able to get the collaborative features to work.

Hopefully, this will be enough to reproduce the bug.

[hbcarlos]

Thanks for the detailed explanation, @maximerischard!

I think jupyterlab keeps some state in the background

The problem is that JupyterLab stores the layout of the workspace in the browser's local storage, so if you launch JupyterLab in collaborative mode from a workspace where you previously worked on JupyterLab without collaboration enabled, all the paths are wrong. The restored documents don't have collaboration enabled.