Question

On my local git repo I’ve got many commits, which include ‘secret’ connection strings 🙂

I don’t want this history on github when I push it there.

Essentially I want to push everything I have, but want to get rid of a whole lot of history.

Perhaps I would be better running in a branch for all my dev, then just merging back to master before committing… then the history for master will just be the commit I want.

I’ve tried running rebase:

git rebase –i HEAD~3

That went back 3 commits, and then I could delete a commit.

However ran into auto cherry-pick failed, and it got quite complex.

Any thoughts greatly appreciated… no big deal to can the history and start again if this gets too hard 🙂

Answer 1

You can branch your current work, rewind the master, then cherry-pick the latest commit back to the master:

git branch secret
git reset --hard HEAD~3
git cherry-pick secret

In pictures,

    A--B--C--D--E (master)

after git branch secret:

    A--B--C--D--E (master, secret)

after git reset --hard HEAD~3:

    A--B (master)
        \
         C--D--E (secret)

after git cherry-pick secret:

    A--B--E' (master)
        \
         C--D--E (secret)

Finally, if you git checkout secret; git rebase master, you can get:

    A--B--E' (master)
           \
            C--D (secret)