May 22, 2020 . 1 min

Completely remove a file from git history

UPDATE: I did run into some pretty good documentation from GitHub here. One caveat is that inorder to remove it from pull requests, you will have to get the GitHub team involved.

Another short one.

Imagine this situation, you committed a file containing passwords into git accidentally. What do you do?

Pretty easy, you just revert that commit. The command below show do the trick.

git reset --soft HEAD^ && git reset

But what if you have made multiple commits after doing this? Yeah, this is messier. But you can still do it. Here is what the code will look like.

git_prune_file() {
  git filter-branch --force --index-filter \
    "git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch '$1'" \
    --prune-empty --tag-name-filter cat -- --all
}

With this in place, you can call git_prune_file on the file that you want to be removed from history. This will go through all the commits and remove that file. Pretty sweet, right?

Just for fun, here is it in action.

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