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Purge Git History

Use the information in this document to delete content from git repositories and purge them from commit histories. This is useful in the following situations:

  1. Removing large files that accidentally got committed.
  2. Removing sensitive content, such as private/secret keys, that got committed.

Prerequisites​

BFG Installation​

  1. Download the latest BFG jar from the above link.
  2. Save it to a common folder such as C:\bfg\
  3. optionally create a script and add it to your path variable
    1. Create an empty text file named bfg.cmd
    2. Add the line: java -jar C:\bfg\bfg-1.14.0.jar %*
    3. Save and close the cmd file.
    4. Add C:\bfg to your system PATH variable.

Steps to Purge Strings​

  1. Ensure you meet the prerequisites above.
  2. Navigate to the offending repository.
  3. Create a text file where each line consists of the string(s) you wish to purge.
  4. From command line, run the command: bfg --replace-text to_remove.txt .
  5. Run the command git reflog expire --expire=now --all && git gc --prune=now --aggressive
  6. Then finally push the changes with git push