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Git: how to remove file and commit from history

13th February 2009

Once I accidentally added circa 300 MiB of archive files to one of my git repositories (which was as small as 5 MiB). I removed those files as soon as I noticed them, but the .git directory still preserved commits with those files, and still occupied over 300 MiB.

I have found the solution at stackoverflow (see also this question).

This method worked for me, but I couldn’t push my rebased repository to the gitosis. I would need to re-init the gitosis repository from my rebased, but I’m not yet prepared to do that.

There is also a slightly different method (which relies on a temporary tag instead of a temporary branch), documented in Git online manual pages; I prefer the temporary branch method.

Below is a full copy-paste of the winning answer by Charles Bailey:

# create and check out a temporary branch at the location of the bad merge
git checkout -b tmpfix

# remove the incorrectly added file
git rm somefile.orig

# commit the amended merge
git commit –amend

# go back to the master branch
git checkout master

# replant the master branch onto the corrected merge
git rebase tmpfix

# delete the temporary branch
git branch -d tmpfix

Also, in my case this thread at stackoverflow was highly useful. I start enjoying the concise and compact style of Charles Bailey :

# detach head and move to D commit
git checkout

# move HEAD to A, but leave the index and working tree as for D
git reset –soft

# Redo the D commit re-using the commit message, but now on top of A
git commit -C

# Re-apply everything from the old D onwards onto this new place
git rebase –onto HEAD master

Note: this example is for a branch of commits R–A–B–C–D–E–HEAD, where commits B & C should be removed from commit history.

Another option is to use git rebase –interactive (for the same example):

git rebase -i HEAD~5

Unfortunately, rebasing on a public (pushed out) branch has no effect for other users of the current gitosis repository.

An alternative to re-initializing gitosis repository from rebased scratch could be switching to a different (rebased) branch, and deleting the outdated master branch; but I haven’t investigated if this works.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 13th, 2009 at 21:21 and is filed under how-to, Links, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

2 Responses to “Git: how to remove file and commit from history”

1. Dateien von einem Git Repository löschen Says:
   June 24th, 2009 at 20:45

   [...] Git geht sogar einen Schritt weiter und ermöglicht unter bestimmten Voraussetzungen Dateien komplett vom repository zu löschen. Also so, dass sie auch in der History nicht mehr auftauchen. Nähere Informationen dazu gibt es hier: Git: how to remove file and commit from history [...]

2. How to truncate git history (sample script included) Says:
   March 28th, 2011 at 20:21

   [...] Git: how to remove file and commit from history [...]

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