How to avoid committing Jupyter Notebook output to Git

When working with Jupyter Notebooks, the output of each cell does not need to be committed as:

• It can contain sensitive information
• It makes the diff harder to read
• It can be easily regenerated by re-running the notebook

This can be achieved by adding a Git filter:

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

and enabling it for .ipynb files using a local .gitattributes file:

*.ipynb filter=strip-notebook-output

Now git status will be readable as only the changes to cell contents (and any new cells) will be tracked.

Advice lifted from this Gist.