JUPYTER_DATA_DIR not updated when building and running local builds of rsconnect-jupyter

[bcwu]

Problem

Running multiple local instances of rsconnect-jupyter can cause version mismatch issues, even when the run environments are isolated through mechanisms such as venv. This is due to how JUPYTER_DATA_DIR is reused as a global state across different sessions.

Details

On MacOS, the JUPYTER_DATA_DIR is defaulted to ~/Library/Jupyter, in which rsconnect-jupyter will symlink nbextensions/rsconnect_jupyter/.

The /rsconnect_jupyter directory contains version.json, which is used by the GUI at runtime; however, the /rsconnect_jupyter symlink is not updated when the user builds and runs another copy of rsconnect-jupyter locally, even in another isolated venv environment. As a consequence, the runtime GUI will point to the stale version.json location. The user will then encounter an error like the following: