<p>Don’t you hate when you can’t remove that file full of cleartext passwords from your github account? Even if you <code>git rm</code> it, it still is accessible in previous versions of the tree. So, you need to rewrite the entire tree. Fortunately, this is really easy with git.</p>
<h2>How?</h2>
<pre class="console">
git filter-branch -f --index-filter 'git update-index --remove filename' HEAD
git push --force --verbose --dry-run
git push --force
</pre>
<p><code>filename</code> is what you want to remove. Now, when you browse past revisions, the file will be gone!</p>
<p><em>You will need to do <code>git push --force</code> to push your changes, as this is no longer a fast forward push (the history and parents have been rewritten)</em></p>
<p>To retain tags you must specify <code>--tag-name-filter "cat"</code> but note that <strong>this will overwrite your existing tags</strong>.</p>
<p>When doing this I usually create a backup like this:</p>
<pre class="console">
cd .git
mkdir backup
cp -r refs backup/refs
cp packed-refs backup
</pre>
<p>since often I run filter-branch several times and you must delete <code>refs/original</code> between runs.</p>
<h2>An Improved Method</h2>
<p>The method given above actually rewrites the whole repository history. Usually, you’ll only want to rewrite it from the revision the sensitive data was introduced:</p>
<pre class="console">
git filter-branch -f --index-filter 'git update-index --remove filename' <introduction-revision-sha1>..HEAD
git push --force --verbose --dry-run
git push --force
</pre>
<p>Where introduction-revision-sha1 is the SHA1 that the file was first committed to the repository.</p>
<h2>References</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-filter-branch.html">git-filter-branch documentation</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/user-manual.html#cleaning-up-history">Git user manual – Cleaning up history</a></li>
</ul>
2008-04-27T08:39:04-07:00
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completely-remove-a-file-from-all-revisions
Completely remove a file from all revisions
2009-10-22T09:17:13-07:00
62842