Data science projects often start with using jupyter notebooks for exploration. When sharing results with others, it helps to have the python code separate from generated plots and plots separated from the code when sharing visualizations to others. Using a pre-commit githook to capture plots and code separately allows data science projects to be more organized and more easily be transitioned from exploration to production.

Git Hooks are scripts you can put in a hooks directory. In this case, we decided to use .githooks as our hooks directory. The hooks will trigger actions at certain points in git’s execution.

For example, the pre-commit, is invoked before obtaining the proposed commit log message and making a commit.

• Git version >=2.9 installed on your system.
• Filenames must not contain spaces.
• jq

Create an .env file and specify NOTEBOOKS_PATH, SCRIPTS_PATH, and HTML_PATH.

For example:

export NOTEBOOKS_PATH="notebooks"
export SCRIPTS_PATH="scripts"
export HTML_PATH="html"

Run:

source .env
make

This will set up the git hooks directory to point to a directory called .githooks. Now, whenever you commit, the pre-commit hook will run.

Add and commit your changed notebook files to git.

git add .
git commit -m "Added iris exploration notebook."

If you encounter an error when saving .ipynb file as a script, such as mv: cannot stat 'notebooks/iris_exploration.py': No such file or directory, you should restart the jupyter server and try again.