How to change the Jupyter start-up folder

Jupyter Notebook and JupyterLab < 3.0

For old Jupyter Notebook interface installed with notebook package and run as jupyter notebook (see the next section for the identical interface installed with nbclassic and run with jupyter nbclassic, and for JupyterLab):

1. Open cmd (or Anaconda Prompt) and run jupyter notebook --generate-config.
2. This writes a file to C:\Users\username\.jupyter\jupyter_notebook_config.py.
3. Browse to the file location and open it in an Editor
4. Search for the following line in the file: #c.NotebookApp.notebook_dir = ''
5. Replace by c.NotebookApp.notebook_dir = '/the/path/to/home/folder/'Make sure you use forward slashes in your path and use /home/user/ instead of ~/ for your home directory, backslashes could be used if placed in double quotes even if folder name contains spaces as such : "D:\yourUserName\Any Folder\More Folders\"
6. Remove the # at the beginning of the line to allow the line to execute

JupyterLab >= 3, Jupyter Notebook Classic, and RetroLab

For recent nbclassic and JupyterLab >= 3 use c.ServerApp.root_dir instead of c.NotebookApp.notebook_dir (and jupyter server --generate-config instead of jupyter notebook --generate-config).

For context see migration guide and this question on differences between server and notebook.