Notebook no longer rendering on GitHub: "state" key missing from metadata.widgets

[Si-ddhartha]

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Hi all,

I have a Jupyter Notebook that I uploaded to GitHub about two months ago, and at that time it rendered perfectly fine in the browser.

However, I recently checked the same notebook and it's now showing this error on GitHub:

I haven’t made any changes to the notebook since uploading. So can anyone guide me on how to fix this properly?

Also here's the link for the repo just in case you need it - repo

[horacemtb]

Same issue here. Please, GitHub, watch your junior devs.

[Inas-21]

Must be a clickbait. Send helpppp !!!

[trravic]

Here's how I resolved with Gemini's Support ^-^

• Rename your .ipynb file to .json (e.g., mynotebook.ipynb to mynotebook.json
• Search for "metadata": { within the JSON file.
• Inside the metadata block, look for a "widgets": { ... } section.
• Carefully delete the entire "widgets": { ... } block, including the opening and closing curly braces and any content within it.
• Save the modified JSON file.
• Rename the file back to its original .ipynb extension (e.g., mynotebook.json to mynotebook.ipynb).

This worked for me :)

Peace!!

[btjanaka]

The above works; it's also worth noting that we are looking for the top-level "metadata" key in the file (some cells have their own "metadata"; those are not the ones to modify). This top-level "metadata" key will usually be near the end of the JSON file.

[yumoku]

Thank you so much @trravic

[MahsaBazzaz]

Thank you! @trravic

[peremartra]

Same here!

[peremartra]

Notebook created with Colab, but uploaded again modified with jupyter and the problem persists. Also all my notebooks are presentng the same issue.

[pizzawarrior]

Same exact situation for me

[Leawnn]

Same issue

[amitsangani]

Same issue...

[bachaudhry]

Same issue. Clearing the outputs of cells which utilize widgets worked for me.

[yasek13piter]

🙏

[crystalloide]

Thanks it works for me too

[Deven10103]

Thanks it worked for me too

[nawroz-m]

It works for me as well, thanks
I am using google colab and I got this issue once I've load dataset form Tensorflow Dataset

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[jorobledo]

same here. Clearing widgets helped, but this was working before.

[NewCodeLearner]

This seems to be a transient issue that does resolve itself over time . Check the previous discussion thread regarding same issue that keeps happening time to time. check the response from GH Support on this matter, there are few workarounds suggested in this link.
jupyter/notebook#3555
jupyter/notebook#3555 (comment)

[nov05]

I’m running into the same issue — none of my older notebooks saved from Colab are displaying properly anymore, but the one I saved today works fine.

[SaturnTsen]

Same issue here: https://github.com/SaturnTsen/CSC_43M04_EP/blob/master/TD5/TD5_2025_GPT.ipynb

[peremartra]

As a temporarly solution you can use:

jupyter nbconvert --clear-output --inplace your_notebook.ipynb

and upload the repository again, it worked for m, waiting for a permanent solution.

[fedorov]

I know this is not helpful to know that I am another user affected, and this only adds pressure ... but that's exactly the reason I am adding this comment: Same Here.

[AdamClarkStandke]

same here bro

[manusmriti31]

I was learning from a few of the collab notebooks uploaded on github by @mrdbourke, and now none of his collab notebooks are opening because of the same issue. Please github solve this asap.

[timmywheels]

Same

[dipanjanS]

This is sad that this hasn't been fixed even after so long. Notebooks open fine in colab but Github's notebook renderer is broken, please fix this.

[wanadzhar913]

Hoping to get a fix for this. Thanks so much!

[AdamClarkStandke]

like wtf

[santiweide]

Same issue...https://github.com/coastalcph/nlp-course/blob/master/labs/notebooks_2025/lab_2.ipynb

[drscotthawley]

While we're waiting on GitHub, here's a gist for a little fix-it script that you can run on one or many .ipynb files:

https://gist.github.com/drscotthawley/e6927f1389f262ecbabfe41d31989e1c

[muziejus]

I can't believe it’s October. This is still broken for me. I appreciate that workarounds exist, but this wasn’t a problem before and now is.

[sdarnadeem]

If you are trying to save a Google collab notebook to Github Repo, try removing all the outputs by going to edit -> clear all outputs. This worked for me.

[jin-raii]

That’s a great tip! Clearing the outputs keeps the file size small and prevents GitHub from getting bogged down by large metadata or complex visuals. It worked perfectly for me in Colab.

[Pranjkaupszh]

Faced same issue. For temporary fix, used this command to remove widgets so it just shows the outputs but note progress bars were set to zero. Here is the command: jupyter nbconvert --ClearMetadataPreprocessor.enabled=True --inplace --to notebook filename.ipynb

Hope it helps in some way.

[lukmanaj]

When will this be fixed? It has lingered for quite a long time.

[nikolpapad]

Also having the same problem with corrupt notebook meta data.

[ianliu1997]

The problem still exists.

[charleslukes]

hey having same issue. Any update please

[BramVanroy]

Same issue - quite annoying if you want to share notebooks with outputs in a readable way.

[Srujanrana07]

hey i saw the repo and i think your file will work locally as i can see the raw
then you can do 1 thing that is upload the file again and check it it works

[dipanjanS]

We need a solution where even if notebook has progress bars, other artifacts, it still renders on GitHub. If jupyter or Colab can render them, ideally it should work here? Please check this.

[anoopboseml]

the issue still persists. really poor effort from the GitHub team to fix this from their end.