Change IPython/Jupyter notebook working directory

jupyter notebook --help-all could be of help:

--notebook-dir=<Unicode> (NotebookManager.notebook_dir)
    Default: u'/Users/me/ipynbs'
    The directory to use for notebooks.

For example:

jupyter notebook --notebook-dir=/Users/yourname/folder1/folder2/

You can of course set it in your profiles if needed, you might need to escape backslash in Windows.

Note that this will override whatever path you might have set in a jupyter_notebook_config.py file. (Where you can set a variable c.NotebookApp.notebook_dir that will be your default startup location.)

As MrFancypants mentioned in the comments, if you are using Jupyter (which you should, since it currently supersedes the older IPython Notebook project), things are a little different. For one, there are no profiles any more.

After installing Jupyter, first check your ~/.jupyter folder to see its content. If no config files were migrated from the default IPython profile (as they weren't in my case), create a new one for Jupyter Notebook:

jupyter notebook --generate-config

This generates ~/.jupyter/jupyter_notebook_config.py file with some helpfully commented possible options. To set the default directory add:

c.NotebookApp.notebook_dir = u'/absolute/path/to/notebook/directory'

As I switch between Linux and OS X, I wanted to use a path relative to my home folder (as they differ – /Users/username and /home/username), so I set something like:

import os
c.NotebookApp.notebook_dir = os.path.expanduser('~/Dropbox/dev/notebook')

Now, whenever I run jupyter notebook, it opens my desired notebook folder. I also version the whole ~/.jupyter folder in my dotfiles repository that I deploy to every new work machine.

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As an aside, you can still use the --notebook-dir command line option, so maybe a simple alias would suit your needs better.

jupyter notebook --notebook-dir=/absolute/path/to/notebook/directory

%pwd  #look at the current work dir
%cd   #change to the dir you want