Clear Jupyter notebook output on commit

Removes cell numbers and output from IPython notebooks added to a git repository, but leaves the files unchanged.

Note: this only works for notebook versions >= 3

Install

1. Clone or download this repository. Let's assume you clone it to:

    ~/.config/git/dropoutput/
   

2. Make sure the drop_ipynb_output.py script is executable, e.g.:

    chmod a+x ~/.config/git/dropoutput/drop_ipynb_output.py
   

3. Add a git filter for files with .ipynb extensions. Add this to your git attributes file (usually located in ~/.config/git/attributes):

    *.ipynb  filter=clean_ipynb
   

4. Connect the drop_ipynb_output.py script to the filter:

    git config --global filter.clean_ipynb.clean "~/.config/git/dropoutput/drop_ipynb_output.py %f"
    git config --global filter.clean_ipynb.smudge cat
   

Configuration

By default, this script will tell git to ignore prompt numbers and cell output when adding any .ipynb file to a git repositorie. Note that the notebook files themselves are not changed, this script just filters out the outputs before adding and committing with git.

This default behavior can be changed either on a notebook-by-notebook basis, or for entire paths. To include output for a single notebook, modify the metadata of the notebook (Edit -> Edit Notebook Metadata in the menu bar) and add this line to the metadata:

"git" : { "clear_outputs" : false }

To include output for any notebook that matches a given glob pattern (e.g., for an entire path), you can create and add paths to the file: ~/.config/git/clean_ipynb_ignore. For example, to include output for all notebooks in ~/projects/notebooks that start with "demo", add a line to the ignore file with:

~/projects/notebooks/demo*

Acknowledgements

This code was inspired by this blog post.