To use nbstripout on a single repository, first make sure you have nbstripout installed (pip install nbstripout) and make sure it's available in the version of python you are using locally (python -m nbstripout --help).

The following snippet will create a filter ipynb_stripout that uses nbstripout, and configures git to use it for all .ipynb files:

cat >> .git/config <<EOF
[filter "ipynb_stripout"]
	clean = python -m nbstripout
	smudge = cat
	required = true
EOF

cat >> .gitattributes <<EOF
*.ipynb filter=ipynb_stripout
EOF

You can set up filters in .git/config, as we did.

The clean portion of the filter is an operation git performs on local files prior to interacting with the git database. This means clean gets run before a commit, but it also is run before other commands like diff. Note that the local file is unchanged by clean; git simply uses the output of clean, rather than the raw file contents, when interacting with internals.

The smudge portion of the filter is what happens to a file stored in the git database when you check it out; there are situations where you'd want to run this, but for our purposes the files in .git are already clean, so we just want to check them out, hence our use of cat.

The required flag indicates whether git should fail when commands do not succeed (the most likely cause is the user not having installed a command, e.g. if they have not installed nbstripout in our case).

Once a filter is set up, we can tell git to use it by creating an attribute pairing in .gitattributes.

The git attribute does not require full **/* style globbing; the example repo includes a notebook in a subdirectory to verify this.

Note: many guides to using nbstripout suggest using an absolute path to the nbstripout.py file. I recommend against this because if you're using ipython notebooks on a team of devs, it would likely be difficult to get a hard-coded path to work for all of them. This is especially true if you are working with a heterogeneous organization (I made this demo for Delta Analytics) rather than a company that can standardize developer tools.

This guide also assumes that the command to invoke a python with a valid nbstripout is simply python; depending on how you have your system and paths set up you might need python3; I highly recommend using pyenv with pyenv-virtualenv, which standardizes project setup so that a vanilla python always works.