Remove large .pack file created by git

by

The issue is that, even though you removed the files, they are still present in previous revisions. That’s the whole point of git, is that even if you delete something, you can still get it back by accessing the history.

What you are looking to do is called rewriting history, and it involved the git filter-branch command.

GitHub has a good explanation of the issue on their site. https://help.github.com/articles/remove-sensitive-data

To answer your question more directly, what you basically need to run is this command with unwanted_filename_or_folder replaced accordingly:

git filter-branch --index-filter 'git rm -r --cached --ignore-unmatch unwanted_filename_or_folder' --prune-empty

This will remove all references to the files from the active history of the repo.

Next step, to perform a GC cycle to force all references to the file to be expired and purged from the packfile. Nothing needs to be replaced in these commands.

git for-each-ref --format="delete %(refname)" refs/original | git update-ref --stdin
# or, for older git versions (e.g. 1.8.3.1) which don't support --stdin
# git update-ref $(git for-each-ref --format="delete %(refname)" refs/original)
git reflog expire --expire=now --all
git gc --aggressive --prune=now

More Related Contents:

  1. Move the most recent commit(s) to a new branch with Git
  2. What is the best (and safest) way to merge a Git branch into master?
  3. git command for making one branch like another
  4. How do I copy a version of a single file from one Git branch to another?
  5. How do I safely merge a Git branch into master?
  6. How to copy commits from one branch to another?
  7. git cherry-pick not working
  8. Find unmerged Git branches?
  9. How to resolve git’s “not something we can merge” error
  10. How do I clone a single branch in Git?
  11. Pull new updates from original GitHub repository into forked GitHub repository
  12. How to change line-ending settings
  13. How do I enable the ident string for a Git repository?
  14. How can I fix the Git error “object file … is empty”?
  15. How to add Git’s branch name to the commit message?
  16. Gitlab repository mirroring
  17. How do I undo ‘git reset’?
  18. How do I delete all Git branches which have been merged?
  19. Git log output to XML, JSON, or YAML?
  20. VSCode: enable or disable editor tabs modified since last git commit, show git status with modified tabs colors
  21. What is GIT_WORK_TREE, why have I never needed to set this ENV var, why now?
  22. How to amend a commit without changing commit message (reusing the previous one)?
  23. git merge, keep both
  24. How do I git rm a file without deleting it from disk? [duplicate]
  25. How do I push to GitHub under a different username?
  26. how do you push only some of your local git commits?
  27. git partial merge, not whole branch
  28. Definitive retroactive .gitignore (how to make Git completely/retroactively *forget* about a file now in .gitignore)
  29. In Jenkins, how to checkout a project into a specific directory (using GIT)
  30. git: squash/fixup earlier commit

Leave a Comment