Remove files from Git history

Planted January 18, 2024

A note for myself because I know I’ll probably do it again in the future…

I managed to accidently commited a text file to a repository and pushed it to GitHub 🤦🏽‍♂️

While it didn’t contain any sensitive data, I still wanted to remove it from the repository’s history. I found this guide on GitHub and these are the exact steps I followed to resolve this issue.

1. Install bfg via Homebrew

   brew install bfg
   

2. Remove the file from the local repository and push this change to the GitHub repository
3. Clone the repository from GitHub to a new location on my machine

   gh repo clone GITHUB_USERNAME_HERE/REPOSITORY_NAME_HERE
   

4. Ran the following command to remove the file from the repository’s history

   bfg --delete-files FILENAME_HERE_WITH_EXTENSION
   

5. Then I ran these commands together (This was what was recommended after running the command above)

   git reflog expire --expire=now --all && git gc --prune=now --aggressive
   

6. Force push the changes to GitHub

   git push --force
   

The file should now be removed from GitHub and you should see a new commit message with no changes made.