ipykernel (Jupyter notebook/labs) cannot import name ''filefind" from traitlets.utils

Question

I installed Jupyter notebook and labs on and EC2 instance and for some reason I get the following error:

ImportError: cannot import name 'filefind' from 'traitlets.utils' (/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/traitlets/utils/init.py)

Jupyter opens fine in the browser but I can't seem to be able to work in an python notebook.

Answer 1

Dirty initial fix (not recommended):

Oke fixed it! It seems like the problem was that the "traitlets/utils/init.py" was empty. So I copy-pasted the code from GitHub and that worked.

https://github.com/ipython/traitlets/blob/main/traitlets/utils/__init__.py

I got this problem twice when I installed two different ec2 instances installing cuda and cudnn. So it might that this has something to do with the origins of this issue.

Proper fix:

The proper way to fix this problem is by upgrading/downgrading the library. Check the other answers to this post for guidance.

Answer 2

I faced the same issue. Downgrading the versions of traitlets and pygments alone, as suggested by @luarzou, didn't solved the problem for me. I also downgrade ipykernel and it works now:

pip install ipykernel==6.0

I opened an issue: https://github.com/ipython/ipykernel/issues/857

Edit: actually this error can happen when your venv has versions of ipykernel or its dependencies different than the env running jupyter. I suggest in that case to delete and recreate your venv, and verify that you don't install there packages that will break the communication/compatibility.