How to commit jupyter notebooks without output to git while keeping the notebooks outputs intact locally

commit_jupyter_notebooks_code_to_git_and_keep_output_locally.md

1. Add a filter to git config by running the following command in bash inside the repo:

git config filter.strip-notebook-output.clean 'jupyter nbconvert --ClearOutputPreprocessor.enabled=True --to=notebook --stdin --stdout --log-level=ERROR'  

2. Create a .gitattributes file inside the directory with the notebooks

3. Add the following to that file:

*.ipynb filter=strip-notebook-output  

After that, commit to git as usual. The notebook output will be stripped out in git commits, but it will remain unchanged locally.

This gist is based on @dirkjot's answer to this StackOverflow question.

@33eyes can you add the 4th step of

4. Run git add --renormalize . to go through all of your existing notebook files and scrub the outputs. Otherwise, you could get heinous merge conflicts later.

PS to people having PATH issues: If you are using VScode, perhaps your issue is caused by vscode running all of the git commands in a weird environment typically different from what you have on the command line.