Clear a specific metadata property of a Jupyter Notebook in version control

Question

When saving my jupyter Notebooks with Git, I'd like to remove:

• Outputs (answered in https://stackoverflow.com/a/58004619/3733974)

• ExecuteTime in metadata (code below in .ipynb)

   "metadata": {
    "ExecuteTime": {
     "end_time": "2020-07-09T11:09:35.842718Z",
     "start_time": "2020-07-09T11:09:35.837714Z"
    },
    "tags": [
     "parameters"
    ]
   }
  

I am able to remove all the metadata with --ClearMetadataPreprocessor.enabled=True but I want to remove only ExecuteTime metadata.

How to update my current command in .git/config?

[filter "strip-notebook-output"]
    clean = "jupyter nbconvert --ClearOutputPreprocessor.enabled=True --ClearMetadataPreprocessor.enabled=True --to=notebook --stdin --stdout --log-level=ERROR"

How to pass arguments to ClearMetadataPreprocessor?

Answer 1

This can be done using preserve_cell_metadata_mask option of the ClearMetadataPreprocessor. As far as I can tell, this feature was added in nbconvert v6.0.

Quote from jupyter nbconvert --help-all:

--ClearMetadataPreprocessor.preserve_cell_metadata_mask=<set-item-1>...
Indicates the key paths to preserve when deleting metadata across both cells and notebook metadata fields. Tuples of keys can be passed to preserved specific nested values
Default: set()

For the OP example the command should be like this:

jupyter nbconvert --ClearOutputPreprocessor.enabled=True \
--ClearMetadataPreprocessor.enabled=True \
--ClearMetadataPreprocessor.preserve_cell_metadata_mask='[("tags")]' \
--to=notebook --stdin --stdout --log-level=ERROR