Cleaning Notebook cell outputs

[jaipreet-s]

Notebooks cell outputs can be a hindrance in Version Control while reviewing the diff of a commit to see what changed (either in a PR or historically)

Some ideas on how we could enable users to deal with outputs in cell in jupyterlab-git

1. Enable a Command Palette option to easily install a Git filter with nbstripout
2. Prompt the user to remove outputs from cells if we detect that there are cell outputs during a git push
3. Use the JupyterLab settings registry to let the user specify that all Notebook outputs must be cleaned on a git push

[suiluj]

i would like to have this feature

[fcollonval]

@suiluj if you are willing, PR are welcome. And we could help you with this.

[suiluj]

@fcollonval i found a easy to understand demo of nbstripout (did not know it till today)

here is the YouTube video demo. so now i think there is no need for further integrating this:

https://youtu.be/BEMP4xacrVc

[fcollonval]

With #700, it is now possible to add nbstripout (for example) when initializing a git repository.

[fcollonval]

As there is no clear answer on the best solutions and because it may not be wanted in some use cases (like using nbval), for now some solutions will be listed here for documentation. First of I want to point interested user to that blog post Making git and Jupyter notebooks play nice.

Here are some solutions:

• nbstripout
• nbconvert
• nb-clean
• jq

To set up such tools at git initialization, you can take advantage of the post_init actions.

[starball5]

Related question on Stack Overflow: How can I configure my tools to ignore or prevent updates to the execution_count field in a Jupyter Notebook from being tracked in git?