Version control of notebooks

Jupyter Notebooks are stored in JSON format, which doesn’t play nicely with Git, but several packages and JupyterLab extensions have been developed to make it easier:

• nbdime (notebook “diff” and “merge”) provides “content-aware” diffing and merging.
  • Adds a Git button to the notebook interface.
  • git diff and git merge shell commands can use nbdime’s diff and merge for notebook files, but leave Git’s behavior unchanged for non-notebook files.
• jupyterlab-git is a JupyterLab extension for version control using Git.
  • Adds a Git tab to the left-side menu bar for version control inside JupyterLab.
• JupyterLab GitHub is a JupyterLab extension for accessing GitHub repositories.
  • Adds a GitHub tab to the left-side menu bar where you can browse and open notebooks from your GitHub repositories.

All three extensions can be used from within the JupyterLab interface.

Installing extensions: Is the git interface not showing up?

JupyterLab is modular, and some parts need to be installed as extensions. In general, either copy and paste installation and configuration commands into a shell or use the JupyterLab extension manager. See the installation instructions.

There are two modes of extension: backend (for the Python server) and frontend (for the browser).

Instructor demonstrates nbdime

1. To understand the problem, the instructor first shows the example notebook and then the source code in JSON format.
2. Then we introduce a simple change to the example notebook, for instance changing colors and also changing dimensions in fig.set_size_inches(6.0, 6.0).
3. We save the change and in the JupyterLab terminal try “normal” git diff and see that this is not very useful.
4. Then the instructor installs jupyterlab-git which also installs nbdime.
5. We then inspect the same change we did in the Git tab of the JupyterLab sidebar.
6. If there is time, we can also show nbdime on the command line.
7. We can point out that Git can be configured to always use nbdime for notebooks.