home · about · projects

Remove Jupyter Notebook Output from Terminal and when using Git

06 Nov 2021

Table of Contents

Often times you want to delete the output of a jupyter notebook before commiting it to a repository, but in most cases you want to still have the notebook output for yourself. In this short guide you will seeh how to delete the notebook output automatically when committing notebooks to a repository while keeping the outputs local.

Removing the Notebook Output in the Command-line

The first tool to do this job is the nbconvert command-line tool to work with jupyter notebooks. First, check your installed version of nbconvert by typing:

jupyter nbconvert --version

In order to delete the output, you can type the following command:

jupyter nbconvert \
  --clear-output \
  --to notebook \
  --output=new_notebook \
  notebook.ipynb

To remove the output inplace, you can type:

jupyter nbconvert \
  --clear-output \
  --inplace \
  notebook.ipynb

If you have nbconvert below version 6.0, change the command to:

jupyter nbconvert \
  --ClearOutputPreprocessor.enabled=True \
  --to notebook \
  --output=new_notebook \
  notebook.ipynb

It is also possible to remove notebook outputs in batch:

find *.ipynb \
  -exec jupyter nbconvert --clear-output --inplace {} \;

Or, by using a simple loop:

for f in *.ipynb; do
  jupyter nbconvert --clear-output --inplace $f 
done

Removing the Notebook Output automatically when Committing

Register a new filter by appending the following lines to the .git/config in your chosen repository:

[filter "remove-notebook-output"]
    clean = "jupyter nbconvert --clear-output --to=notebook --stdin --stdout --log-level=ERROR"

If you want the filter to be available globally, append it to ~/.gitconfig instead. Also, remember to check the nbconvert version and change the command as shown previously.

Now, append the following lines to the .gitattributes file:

*.ipynb filter=remove-notebook-output

If you want to apply those filters only to a specific folder you can instead append:

folder/*.ipynb filter=remove-notebook-output

That’s all! Now you should be able to commit jupyter notebooks to git repositories without output if you followed all the steps.

Resources

For more resources, have a look at:

Related Posts