What I tried when Spyder stopped running

Spyder

Spyder is Pyhton’s integrated development environment.

There are many development environments for Python, but I have been using it conveniently since it came with Anaconda when I installed it on Windows 10.

The other day, Spyder stopped running for some reason.

When I tried to start it, the splash window appeared, but the Spyder integrated development environment window did not appear.

The above splash window appears, but beyond that, the integrated development environment does not appear at all.

I tried restarting Windows again, but the situation remained the same.

Environment

The environment in which this occurred is as follows.

How to respond

Delete the spyder.lock folder.

The first thing I tried was to delete the spyder.lock folder.

This folder is automatically created when the Spyder starts up (it used to be a file in previous versions) and is used for exclusivity control.

If this folder is corrupted for some reason, it will be misinterpreted as another Spyder running and prevent it from starting.

The location of the folder varies depending on the environment, but in my case it was in the following location.

If the folder does not exist at the time of starting, it will be created even if the folder is deleted.

C:Users\User Name\.spyder-py3\spyder.lock

However, the result remained the same and the Spyder did not start.

reset Command

The next thing I tried was the reset command.

As a result, after resetting all the settings with this command, it started up normally.

From the anaconda prompt,

spyder --reset

However, this command resets the entire environment, so all open Python scripts, themes and other appearance settings, language settings, etc. are reset.

It was better than not being able to use it at all, so I reset all the settings and it started up normally.

After that, I changed the language setting to Japanese, but the location of the Japanese setting in Spyder 5.0.5 is different from the previous version, so I am writing this article for the record.

Language settings

From the Spyder menu, Tools Preferences Application Advanced settings Language:

update –all

In addition, if the above does not solve the problem, I was going to update all Anaconda packages, but I did not do it this time.

conda update --all

To update a specific package only, use the following command

conda update Package Name

When I used to update with update -all, I was bewildered by too many changes in the settings, so recently I have been updating in the GUI environment by specifying the package and version from Anaconda Navigator.

If you use the above method, you can update only the specified package with the specified version.

This concludes this article.

I hope this article will be useful to someone somewhere.