{"id":690,"date":"2014-04-08T11:00:46","date_gmt":"2014-04-08T15:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/reviewsignal.com\/blog\/?p=690"},"modified":"2014-04-06T04:21:59","modified_gmt":"2014-04-06T08:21:59","slug":"how-to-remove-files-from-git-repo-permanently","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reviewsignal.com\/blog\/2014\/04\/08\/how-to-remove-files-from-git-repo-permanently\/","title":{"rendered":"How To Remove Files from Git Repo Permanently"},"content":{"rendered":"

I ran into this issue in the past week. My .PACK file was enormous (many many gigabytes) because I committed a lot of files I shouldn't have in the past. Large binary files, backups and other things that don't belong in a Git repo.<\/p>\n

I deleted the files and committed those, but Git is really good at making sure you never lose data. So despite having a small repo, I had a .PACK file that was 10 times the size of the repo.<\/p>\n

I googled around a lot and the best post I could find on StackOverflow was completely remove files from git repo and github on remote<\/a>. It didn't quite work for me though.<\/p>\n\n

git filter-branch<\/span> -f<\/span> --index-filter<\/span> 'git rm -r --cached --ignore-unmatch "filename"'<\/span> --prune-empty<\/span> HEAD\nrm<\/span> -rf<\/span> .git\/<\/span>refs\/<\/span>original\/<\/span> &&<\/span> git reflog<\/span> expire --expire<\/span>=now --all<\/span> &&<\/span> git gc<\/span> --aggressive<\/span> --prune<\/span>=now<\/pre><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/div>\n\n
I just had to add a few flags to get this working.<\/p>\n\n
-f<\/span><\/pre><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/div>\n\n
 and<\/p>\n\n
--prune-empty<\/span><\/pre><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/div>\n\n
 in the git filter-branch.<\/p>\n\n
--expire<\/span>=now<\/pre><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/div>\n\n
 and<\/p>\n\n
--prune<\/span>=now<\/pre><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/div>\n\n
 in the second line of commands.<\/p>\n
Now you can run those two commands (replacing filename with a file name or directory) and it should permanently remove the file from the repo including the PACK file. <\/p>\n
Be very careful when you run this command, I am not sure there is a way to undo this change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I ran into this issue in the past week. My .PACK file was enormous (many many gigabytes) because I committed a lot of files I shouldn’t have in the past. Large binary files, backups and other things that don’t belong in a Git repo. I deleted the files and committed those, but Git is really […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[66],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reviewsignal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reviewsignal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reviewsignal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviewsignal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviewsignal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=690"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/reviewsignal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":697,"href":"https:\/\/reviewsignal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690\/revisions\/697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reviewsignal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviewsignal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviewsignal.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}