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Why are you seeing this issue?

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Service

codespaces-jupyter

Context

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GitHub Support Plan

• Top 20
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• Enterprise
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GitHub Product(s) Impacted (check appropriate boxes and provide GHES version if applicable)

• GitHub.com (including GHEC)
• GitHub Enterprise Server.
  • Running version: x.y.z
  • Recently upgraded from version: x.y.z (upgrade date: yyyy-mm-dd)
• Proxima (ghe.com)
  • Customer tenant: -

Customer Impact

If applicable, list the impacted entities:

• Enterprise: -
• Organization: -
• Repository: rasbt/LLMs-from-scratch
• User: d-kleine

Zendesk Ticket(s), support bundles, and other relevant Issues and links

• ZD_3500257_

Issue

Here's the details provided by the customer:

When viewing Jupyter Notebooks (.ipynb files) on GitHub, notebooks that contain a metadata.widgets block without a "state" key fail to render in the browser. Instead of displaying the notebook content, GitHub shows an error message indicating that the 'state' key is missing from metadata.widgets. This issue prevents users from viewing or sharing affected notebooks directly on GitHub.

Example:
https://github.com/rasbt/LLMs-from-scratch/blob/00b8c0a107f4cec0012cf8d1f6b54309846d25dd/ch05/11_qwen3/standalone-qwen3.ipynb

GitHub’s notebook renderer seems to enforce stricter validation and refuses to display the notebook if the "state" key is missing. The notebook remains fully functional in local Jupyter environments, where the renderer is more tolerant of incomplete widget metadata.

This issue disrupts the workflow for users who rely on GitHub for sharing, reviewing, or collaborating on Jupyter notebooks online in the browser. This issue has been reported already here:

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/155944
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79661958/jupyter-notebook-rendering-error-state-key-missing-from-metadata-widgets-de
For me, this looks like the "state" key is a strict setting specifically for the GitHub render, that might get lost through export to .ipynb.

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Create or obtain a Jupyter notebook (.ipynb) file.
2. Ensure the notebook’s JSON includes a metadata.widgets block but omits the "state" key (for example, by exporting editing the metadata manually).
3. Commit and push the notebook to a GitHub repository
4. View the notebook on GitHub in the browser
5. Observe that GitHub displays an error stating that the 'state' key is missing from metadata.widgets, and the notebook does not render
6. See error

Expected behavior

A clear and concise description of what you expected to happen.

Screenshots

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Additional context

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