In my personal git repo, I have a directory that contains thousands of small images that are no longer needed. Is there a way to delete them from the entire git history? I have tried
git filter-branch --index-filter "git rm -rf --cached --ignore-unmatch imgs" HEAD
and
git filter-branch --tree-filter 'rm -fr imgs' HEAD
but the size of the git repo remains unchanged. Any ideas?
Thanks
The ProGit book has an interesting section on Removing Object.
It does end with this:
Your history no longer contains a reference to that file.
However, yourreflogand a new set of refs that Git added when you did thefilter-branchunder.git/refs/originalstill do, so you have to remove them and then repack the database. You need to get rid of anything that has a pointer to those old commits before you repack:
$ rm -Rf .git/refs/original
$ rm -Rf .git/logs/
$ git gc
$ git prune --expire
(git prune --expire is not mandatory but can remove the directory content from the loose objects)
Backup everything before doing those commands, just in case ;)
Actually none of these techniques workedfor me. I found the most reliable was was to simply pull locally into another repo:
git pull file://$(pwd)/myGitRepo
It also saves you the hassle of deletig old tags.
see the story on my blog: http://stubbisms.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/git-script-to-show-largest-pack-objects-and-trim-your-waist-line/
git-filter-branch by default saves old refs in refs/original/* namespace.
You need to delete them, and then do git gc --prune=now
Answer for the year 2021
This surprisingly turns out to be hard task. Google turns up pages that are way back dated to 2009 and StackOverflow discussions almost a decade old. Lot of those things don't work any more!
Here's what works (also recommended way according to git docs):
First install git-filter-repo:
pip install git-filter-repo
Next, delete folders from git history. This will rewrite entire Git history except for the excluded folder!
git filter-repo --force --invert-paths --path to/folder1 --path to/folder
Next, add back the remotes:
git remote add origin https://...
Next, force push upstream:
git push --force --set-upstream origin master
So that's the bunch of commands but I haven't found a shorter better way.