Doctoral programming intro

Notebooks containing lesson materials for An Introduction to research programming with Python course run at University College London (UCL) by the Research Software Development Group (RSDG).

Using nbstripout to remove notebook outputs

To give more meaningful diffs and avoid system specific information such as paths in exception tracebacks being committed to the repository all notebooks should have their outputs stripped before committing.

The Python package nbstripout is a convenient tool for automating this process. It can be installed into the current Python environment by running

pip install nbstripout

To manually strip the outputs from all notebook in the notebooks directory the following can then be run

nbstripout notebooks/*.ipynb

To avoid having to perform this step manually before adding files to the staging area, a Git filter can instead be set up by running

nbstripout --install

This will apply nbstripout automatically to files added to the staging area (while leaving the files in the working copy untouched).