Clean GIT history with BFG Repo-Cleaner

Remove your GIT History

BFG is faster and simpler way for Removing Big Files, Passwords, Credentials & other private data. It will rewrite the complete commit history i.e. all the commit hash, branch/tags refs will get changed without interfering with commit message and branch names.

Initial Setup

Download BFG

BFG: https://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/

Download the JAR and put it in the same folder where you are going to clone your bare/mirror repo — /Users/Vinay/your-git-repo.git (Put it inside folder ‘Vinay’).

You need to have at least Java 7 installed on your computer in order for this to work.

Clean latest commit and push

The BFG tool does not touch the latest commit, so you must first remove all the secrets from the repo, such that the latest commit is a clean commit (free of any secrets.)

Backup your GitHub repository first

Mirror Clone your repo as backup if things go ugly and rename it as your-git-repo-backup.git

Clone Repository

Mirror-clone/bare-clone (Learn the difference if you don’t know) your repository.

git clone --mirror path-to-your-git-repo.git

Usage

BFG command options

To Strip Large blobs

To delete all files which are more than 10Mb in size

java -jar bfg.jar --strip-blobs-bigger-than 10M your-git-repo.git

For password text cleanup

Create a file calledreplacements.txt and add to it all the passwords you want BFG to remove (one per line) . The replacements.txt file should contain all the substitutions you want to do, in a format like this (one entry per line - note the comments shouldn't be included):

PASSWORD1 #Replace literal string 'PASSWORD1' with '***REMOVED***' (default)
PASSWORD2==>examplePass         #Replace with 'examplePass' instead
PASSWORD3==>                    #Replace with the empty string
regex:password=\w+==>password=  #Replace, using a regex
regex:\r(\n)==>$1               #Replace Windows newlines with Unix newlines

Remove unwanted passwords with BFG:

java -jar bfg.jar - — replace-text replacements.txt your-git-repo.git

Remove unwanted passwords on specific files -

java -jar bfg.jar -fi *.php - — replace-text replacements.txt your-git-repo.git

To Remove file from history

Remove unwanted files with BFG:

java -jar bfg.jar - — delete-files file-to-be-deleted.php your-git-repo.git

java -jar bfg.jar -— delete-files {*.config,*.xml} your-git-repo.git

Note that you can also specify a wildcard to match multiple files (e.g. file*.txt will match fileA.txt, fileB.txt, file12345.txt, etc.).

To remove Folder from history

Remove unwanted folders with BFG:

java -jar bfg.jar - — delete-folders {OldConfigsFolder} your-git-repo.git

Force git to garbage-collect inside the mirror repo

cd your-git-repo.git

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

After this, you need to run

git push -f

Problem you might face

These are your protected commits, and so their contents will NOT be altered:
commit 0afd3c44 (protected by ‘HEAD’) — contains 1 dirty files :
dr/content/some-file.csv (198 KB)

• If you see something like this while running any BFG command, it means that you don’t have a clean HEAD branch. Best thing would be to make a manual commit of clean that file(remove credentials from that file) OR you can use — --no-blob-protection option with the BFG command.
• If you’re wondering why BFG is not cleaning files larger than 1MB in size, the reason is BFG only looks at text files under 1MB by default. You can use -fs <size in MB,KB,GB>option with the command.

-fs, --filter-content-size-threshold <size>
only do file-content filtering on files smaller than <size> (default is 1048576 bytes)

Hope, this will help someone. Cheers!!

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