cmdline_provenance is a Python package for keeping track of your data processing steps.
It was inspired by the popular NCO and CDO command line tools, which automatically generate a record of what was executed at the command line, append that record to the history attribute from the input (netCDF) data file, and then set the new extended record as the history attribute of the output (netCDF) data file.
For example, after selecting the 2001-2005 time period from a rainfall data file
and then deleting the long_name file attribute,
the command log would look as follows:
Fri Dec 08 10:05:47 2017: ncatted -O -a long_name,pr,d,, rainfall_data_200101-200512.nc
Fri Dec 01 07:59:16 2017: cdo seldate,2001-01-01,2005-12-31 rainfall_data_185001-200512.nc rainfall_data_200101-200512.nc
Following this simple approach to data provenance, it is possible maintain a record of all data processing steps from intial download/creation of your data files to the end result (e.g. a .png image).
cmdline_provenance contains a series of functions for generating history records in the NCO/CDO format,
and for combining the current record with previous records to maintain a complete command log.
http://cmdline-provenance.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
pip install cmdline-provenance
or
conda install cmdline_provenance
(The conda-forge feedstock for the conda installation can be found here.)