Question

I’ve added some large binary files quite awhile ago I probably shouldn’t have, committed & pushed to Github.

Now when myself & others clone, it takes ages – is there a way to fix this, perhaps by deleting those files permanently or deleting those old commits?

Answer 1

A quick google search gave me this bash script. I believe this should work with github.

#!/bin/bash
set -o errexit

# Author: David Underhill
# Script to permanently delete files/folders from your git repository.  To use
# it, cd to your repository's root and then run the script with a list of paths
# you want to delete, e.g., git-delete-history path1 path2

if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
    exit 0
fi

# make sure we're at the root of git repo
if [ ! -d .git ]; then
    echo "Error: must run this script from the root of a git repository"
    exit 1
fi

# remove all paths passed as arguments from the history of the repo
files=$@
git filter-branch --index-filter "git rm -rf --cached --ignore-unmatch $files" HEAD

# remove the temporary history git-filter-branch otherwise leaves behind for a long time
rm -rf .git/refs/original/ && git reflog expire --all &&  git gc --aggressive --prune