How to merge changes in Jupyter notebooks

Question

Collaboration with a coworker on a Jupyter notebook is driving me nuts. We're working on different versions (I would say "branches", but that's probably too fancy for what we're doing) of the same notebook. I try to merge (some of) the changes he introduces, into my version. Since diffing JSON files is a nightmare, I convert the two notebooks to .py files (Download as\Python (.py file) from the File menu of the notebooks) and then compare the .py files in PyCharm. This works nicely, also because all output is removed when exporting to .py.

The problem now is to import the changed .py file into Jupyter. Is this possible? The one thing that gives me hope of an affirmative answer, is that into the exported .py files there are some # In[4]: comments, which maybe the Jupyter interface may use to understand how the code is divided into cells. Or is it just impossible to go back? If so, do you have any other suggestions to merge some of changes between two different versions of a Jupyter notebook?

Answer 1

To answer the second question: (And this question looks related there)

When we had that problem, using jq as described in this post worked okay. (The part starting from "Enter jq".)

To use this, you would have a second, "stripped" version of the notebook which is the one you add to git, in addition to your development notebook (which is not added to git, otherwise you get merge conflicts with the development notebooks of your teammates).

You always need an additional step,

nbstrip_jq mynotebook.ipynb > mynotebook_stripped.ipynb

before doing git add mynotebook_stripped.ipynb, git commit etc. But if everyone in your team does that, the changes are more or less nicely manageable with git. For bigger projects, you could try automating it like described further below in the same post.