4

How do you remove mistakenly committed large files from commit history? Git won't push any more commits to remote until I remove problematic files. I've since attempted to remove them but they exist in previous commits.

Note: I do not need the large files anymore in project.

On git push origin my-branch I get:

remote: warning: File public/images/reserve_assets/myfile.tif is 63.60 MB; this is larger than GitHub's recommended maximum file size of 50.00 MB remote: error: GH001: Large files detected. You may want to try Git Large File Storage - https://git-lfs.github.com. remote: error: Trace: 0c08ce8916353c82c7328a241a40c8ca remote: error: See http://git.io/iEPt8g for more information. remote: error: File public/images/reserve_assets/myotherfile.tif is 107.34 MB; this exceeds GitHub's file size limit of 100.00 MB

Then

! [remote rejected] my-branch -> my-branch (pre-receive hook declined) error: failed to push some refs to '[email protected]:RepoOwner/myrepo.git'

I've tried git filter-branch --tree-filter 'rm -f myfile.tif' HEAD which performs the rewrites across the commit history. It outputs 

Rewrite 1cd9b031d047d4270ff8b488b3b5e8db2905c687 (87/93) (12 seconds passed, remaining 0 predicted)

But then says WARNING: Ref 'refs/heads/my-branch' is unchanged. It seems like it's rewriting and removing from the history but I still cannot push.

Improve this question
2

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

I had other files which were large too. You cannot remove a single file at a time via git filter-branch --tree-filter 'rm -rf path/to/your/file' HEAD as each time it creates a single backup.

Removing the entire problematic folder via git filter-branch -f --tree-filter 'rm -rf path/to/folder' HEAD with additional -f to force former backup rewrite does the trick (assuming you've tried previously with removing a single file)

Improve this answer
Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

1 Comment

Actually, you can remove one file at a time. You just shouldn't because filter-branch is so slow. It also goes much faster if you use the --index-filter, for which you must use git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch instead of plain rm -f (the rest of the rules are pretty similar).

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.