Cleaning up svn history in git
8. Jun 2012
1 minute read

I was importing svn repositories into git. Once in the past there was a accidential commit of compiled files and a caching directory (target and .metadata). Since these where quite large and are messing up the history I wanted to remove them. I did it this way:

 git filter-branch -f --index-filter \
     'git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch */target/*' \
     --prune-empty -- --all
 git filter-branch -f --index-filter \
     'git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch .metadata' \
     --prune-empty -- --all
 rm -rf .git/refs/original/
 git reflog expire --expire=now --all
 git gc --prune=now
 git gc --aggressive --prune=now
 git push origin master --force

After these steps the repository shrunk from 277MB to 24MB!


Note: BFG Repo-Cleaner is a nice and fast tool as an alternative.