Tracking notebooks with git

The main challent of tracking notebooks with git is that every time you re-generate an output, git will keep track of that. It makes each commit large, and hard to keep track of. Fortunately, there is a script that removes the output prior to your commit. I’m using nbstripout. You can turn it on by doing, inside your git repo,

nbstripout --install

and turn it off by doing

nbstripout --install

It works great. Unfortunately, it doesn’t behave super well when switching to other branches where nbstripout was not applied; basically, it removes the output from every notebook it fines, and then requires you to git commit before you can switch out of that branch. Not great. So instead, I apply it manually to the notebook that I want to commit. You can do so by typing

nbstripout FILE.ipynb