Solving "500: Internal Server Error, nbconvert failed: xelatex not found in PATH"
Whenever I try to export a Jupyter notebook as a PDF I get the following error in a separate window:
500 : Internal Server Error
The error was:
nbconvert failed: xelatex not found on PATH, if you have not installed xelatex you may need to do so. Find further instructions at https://nbconvert.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install.html#installing-tex.
I am running macOS Sierra 10.12.6.
Things I have tried:
- Re-installing nbconvert through pip (in the Jupyter notebook) and conda (terminal)
- Installing xelatex for Mac
- Re-installing Mactex
- Installing pandoc (both through pip and through "conda install -c conda-forge pandoc")
Running
!echo $PATH
Yields:
/Users/ed/anaconda/bin:/Users/ed/anaconda/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin
I located the directory containing xelatex as per @einsweniger suggestion here: /usr/local/texlive/bin/x86_64-darwin. I copied and pasted XeLatex into the bin directory above, and get a new error:
```nbconvert failed: PDF creating failed, captured latex output:
warning: kpathsea: configuration file texmf.cnf not found in these directories: /Users/e/anaconda/bin:/Users/ed/anaconda/bin/share/texmf-local/web2c:/Users/ed/anaconda/bin/share/texmf-dist/web2c:/Users/ed/anaconda/bin/share/texmf/web2c:/Users/ed/anaconda/bin/texmf-local/web2c:/Users/ed/anaconda/bin/texmf-dist/web2c:/Users/ed/anaconda/bin/texmf/web2c:/Users/ed/anaconda:/Users/edefilippis/anaconda/share/texmf-local/web2c:/Users/e/anaconda/share/texmf-dist/web2c:/Users/ed/anaconda/share/texmf/web2c:/Users/ed/anaconda/texmf-
This is XeTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-0.99999 (TeX Live 2018) (preloaded format=xelatex)
kpathsea: Running mktexfmt xelatex.fmt
I can't find the format file `xelatex.fmt'!
```
I also put xelatex.fmt in the directory, but am still getting the error.
Answer
I encountered the same issue. As people previously stated, the problem lies in that xlatex isn't found in your PATH environment variable.
A solution that worked for me was to run the following from the notebook:
!export PATH=/Library/TeX/texbin:$PATH
Or in a command line simply:
export PATH=/Library/TeX/texbin:$PATH
And then run the export to pdf from a command line (within your virtual environment if there is one in place) as follows:
jupyter nbconvert your_notebook.ipynb --to pdf
This should create a pdf of your notebook on the same directory it is running.