Jupyter Notebook Diffs

Part 2 & Alumni (2018)
1

Hey all!

So, I’m not sure how often the rest of you update the git repo, or how often you modify the existing notebooks (or always just make copies), but I run into a lot of merge conflicts.

I git stash, then git pull then try to git stash pop and it’s merge conflict city.

It sucks to deal with the merge conflicts- as great as Jupyter Notebooks are, and as parsable as JSON is, manually resolving the merge conflicts is painful.

The important bit:

So, I googled around a bit and found nbdime.

(install with pip install nbdime)

Check it out. It’s phenomenal.

There’s a web view tool, and a native git integration.

23 Likes
2

Oh wow that’s rather terrific.

3

Awesome find! That’s something I struggle with both with the Fast.ai library and at work.

4

Sweet … thanks for sharing !!

5

I just make copies of notebook and name the new notebooks starting with “tmp_” .
This makes git ignore the file. I think Jeremy mentioned this in one of his videos.

6

True - but just to clarify, it’s only because I put tmp* in the fastai .gitignore - it’s not a general git thing.

1 Like
7

Oh. Didn’t know that it is managed by git ignore. Good to know. Thanks.

8

nbdime is great for local diff/merge. If you need to diff Notebooks stored on GitHub, checkout ReviewNb. I wrote more about it here.

Disclaimer: I built ReviewNb.