How to find identify large commits in git history

Question

I have a 300 MB git repo  The total size of my currently checked-out files is 2 MB  and the total size of the rest of the git repo is 298 MB  This is basically a code-only repo that should not be more than a few MB   I suspect someone accidentally committed some large files  video  images  etc   and then removed them    but not from git  so the history still contains useless large files  How can find the large files in the git history  There are 400  commits  so going one-by-one is not practical    NOTE  my question is not about how to remove the file  but how to find it in the first place

User · Answer

You should use BFG Repo-Cleaner   According to the website      The BFG is a simpler  faster alternative to git-filter-branch for   cleansing bad data out of your Git repository history          Removing Crazy Big Files   Removing Passwords  Credentials  amp  other Private data      The classic procedure for reducing the size of a repository would be   git clone --mirror git   example com some-big-repo git java -jar bfg jar --strip-biggest-blobs 500 some-big-repo git cd some-big-repo git git reflog expire --expire now --all git gc --prune now --aggressive git push

User · Answer

Step 1 Write all file SHA1s to a text file   git rev-list --objects --all   sort -k 2  gt  allfileshas txt   Step 2 Sort the blobs from biggest to smallest and write results to text file   git gc  amp  amp  git verify-pack -v  git objects pack pack-  idx   egrep    w  blob W  0-9    0-9    0-9       sort -k 3 -n -r  gt  bigobjects txt   Step 3a Combine both text files to get file name sha1 size information   for SHA in  cut -f 1 -d    lt  bigobjects txt   do echo   grep  SHA bigobjects txt    grep  SHA allfileshas txt    awk   print  1  3  7    gt  gt  bigtosmall txt done    Step 3b If you have file names or path names containing spaces try this variation of Step 3a  It uses cut instead of awk to get the desired columns incl  spaces from column 7 to end of line   for SHA in  cut -f 1 -d    lt  bigobjects txt   do echo   grep  SHA bigobjects txt    grep  SHA allfileshas txt    cut -d     -f 1 3 7-   gt  gt  bigtosmall txt done    Now you can look at the file bigtosmall txt in order to decide which files you want to remove from your Git history   Step 4 To perform the removal  note this part is slow since it s going to examine every commit in your history for data about the file you identified    git filter-branch --tree-filter  rm -f myLargeFile log  HEAD     Source  Steps 1-3a were copied from Finding and Purging Big Files From Git History  EDIT  The article was deleted sometime in the second half of 2017  but an archived copy of it can still be accessed using the Wayback Machine

User · Answer

A blazingly fast shell one-liner  This shell script displays all blob objects in the repository  sorted from smallest to largest  For my sample repo  it ran about 100 times faster than the other ones found here  On my trusty Athlon II X4 system  it handles the Linux Kernel repository with its 5 6 million objects in just over a minute  The Base Script git rev-list --objects --all     git cat-file --batch-check    objecttype    objectname    objectsize    rest       sed -n  s  blob   p      sort --numeric-sort --key 2     cut -c 1-12 41-       command -v gnumfmt    echo numfmt  --field 2 --to iec-i --suffix B --padding 7 --round nearest  When you run above code  you will get nice human-readable output like this      0d99bb931299  530KiB path to some-image jpg 2ba44098e28f   12MiB path to hires-image png bd1741ddce0d   63MiB path to some-video-1080p mp4  macOS users  Since numfmt is not available on macOS  you can either omit the last line and deal with raw byte sizes or brew install coreutils  Filtering To achieve further filtering  insert any of the following lines before the sort line  To exclude files that are present in HEAD  insert the following line  grep -vF --file  lt  git ls-tree -r HEAD   awk   print  3       To show only files exceeding given size  e g  1  MiB   220  B   insert the following line  awk   2  gt   2 20     Output for Computers To generate output that s more suitable for further processing by computers  omit the last two lines of the base script  They do all the formatting  This will leave you with something like this      0d99bb93129939b72069df14af0d0dbda7eb6dba 542455 path to some-image jpg 2ba44098e28f8f66bac5e21210c2774085d2319b 12446815 path to hires-image png bd1741ddce0d07b72ccf69ed281e09bf8a2d0b2f 65183843 path to some-video-1080p mp4   File Removal For the actual file removal  check out this SO question on the topic

User · Answer

I stumbled across this for the same reason as anyone else  But the quoted scripts didn t quite work for me   I ve made one that is more a hybrid of those I ve seen and it now lives here - https   gitlab com inorton git-size-calc

User · Answer

I ve found a one-liner solution on ETH Zurich Department of Physics wiki page  close to the end of that page   Just do a git gc to remove stale junk  and then  git rev-list --objects --all       grep    git verify-pack -v  git objects pack   idx                sort -k 3 -n                tail -10                awk   print 1       will give you the 10 largest files in the repository   There s also a lazier solution now available  GitExtensions now has a plugin that does this in UI  and handles history rewrites as well

User · Answer

Try git ls-files   xargs du -hs --threshold 1M   We use the below command in our CI pipeline  it halts if it finds any big files in the git repo   test   git ls-files   xargs du -hs --threshold 1M 2 gt  dev null   tee  dev stderr   wc -l  -gt 0  amp  amp    echo  echo  Aborting due to big files in the git repository    exit 1       true

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If you are on Windows  here is a PowerShell script that will print the 10 largest files in your repository    revision objects   git rev-list --objects --all   files    revision objects Split     Where-Object     Length -gt 0 -and   Test-Path -Path    -PathType Leaf      files   Get-Item -Force   select fullname  length   sort -Descending -Property Length   select -First 10

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I ve found this script very useful in the past for finding large  and non-obvious  objects in a git repository   http   stubbisms wordpress com 2009 07 10 git-script-to-show-largest-pack-objects-and-trim-your-waist-line       bin bash  set -x      Shows you the largest objects in your repo s pack file    Written for osx       see https   stubbisms wordpress com 2009 07 10 git-script-to-show-largest-pack-objects-and-trim-your-waist-line     author Antony Stubbs     set the internal field separator to line break  so that we can iterate easily over the verify-pack output IFS    n       list all objects including their size  sort by size  take top 10 objects  git verify-pack -v  git objects pack pack-  idx   grep -v chain   sort -k3nr   head    echo  quot All sizes are in kB s  The pack column is the size of the object  compressed  inside the pack file  quot    output  quot size pack SHA location quot  allObjects  git rev-list --all --objects  for y in  objects do       extract the size in bytes     size     echo  y   cut -f 5 -d      1024         extract the compressed size in bytes     compressedSize     echo  y   cut -f 6 -d      1024         extract the SHA     sha  echo  y   cut -f 1 -d            find the objects location in the repository tree     other  echo  quot   allObjects  quot    grep  sha       lineBreak  echo -e  quot  n quot       output  quot   output  n  size    compressedSize    other  quot  done   echo -e  output   column -t -s        That will give you the object name  SHA1sum  of the blob  and then you can use a script like this one   Which commit has this blob       to find the commit that points to each of those blobs

User · Answer

If you only want to have a list of large files  then I d like to provide you with the following one-liner  join -o  quot 1 1 1 2 2 3 quot   lt  git rev-list --objects --all   sort   lt  git verify-pack -v objects pack   idx   sort -k3 -n   tail -5   sort    sort -k3 -n  Whose output will be  commit       file name                                  size in bytes  72e1e6d20    db players sql 818314 ea20b964a    app assets images background final2 png 6739212 f8344b9b5    data test pg xlog 000000010000000000000001 1625545 1ecc2395c    data development pg xlog 000000010000000000000001 16777216 bc83d216d    app assets images background 1forfinal psd 95533848  The last entry in the list points to the largest file in your git history  You can use this output to assure that you re not deleting stuff with BFG you would have needed in your history  Be aware  that you need to clone your repository with --mirror for this to work

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Powershell solution for windows git  find the largest files   git ls-tree -r -t -l --full-name HEAD   Where-Object       -match       s      s      s   d   s            ForEach-Object    New-Object -Type PSObject -Property          col1            matches 1        col2          matches 2        col3     matches 3        Size          int  matches 4        path         matches 5          sort -Property Size -Top 10 -Descending

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I was unable to make use of the most popular answer because the --batch-check command-line switch to Git 1 8 3  that I have to use  does not accept any arguments  The ensuing steps have been tried on CentOS 6 5 with Bash 4 1 2  Key Concepts  In Git  the term blob implies the contents of a file  Note that a commit might change the contents of a file or pathname  Thus  the same file could refer to a different blob depending on the commit  A certain file could be the biggest in the directory hierarchy in one commit  while not in another  Therefore  the question of finding large commits instead of large files  puts matters in the correct perspective   For The Impatient  Command to print the list of blobs in descending order of size is   git cat-file --batch-check  lt   lt  git rev-list --all --objects      awk   print  1       grep blob    sort -n -r -k 3   Sample output   3a51a45e12d4aedcad53d3a0d4cf42079c62958e blob 305971200 7c357f2c2a7b33f939f9b7125b155adbd7890be2 blob 289163620   To remove such blobs  use the BFG Repo Cleaner  as mentioned in other answers  Given a file blobs txt that just contains the blob hashes  for example   3a51a45e12d4aedcad53d3a0d4cf42079c62958e 7c357f2c2a7b33f939f9b7125b155adbd7890be2   Do   java -jar bfg jar -bi blobs txt  lt repo dir gt    The question is about finding the commits  which is more work than finding blobs  To know  please read on   Further Work  Given a commit hash  a command that prints hashes of all objects associated with it  including blobs  is   git ls-tree -r --full-tree  lt commit hash gt    So  if we have such outputs available for all commits in the repo  then given a blob hash  the bunch of commits are the ones that match any of the outputs  This idea is encoded in the following script      bin bash DB DIR  trees-db   find commit         cd   DB DIR      for f in    do         if grep -q  1   f   then             echo   f          fi     done     cd -  gt   dev null    create db         local tfile   tmp commits txt      mkdir -p   DB DIR   amp  amp  cd   DB DIR      git rev-list --all  gt    tfile       while read commit hash  do         if      -e   commit hash      then             git ls-tree -r --full-tree   commit hash   gt    commit hash          fi     done  lt    tfile      cd -  gt   dev null     rm -f   tfile     create db  while read id  do     find commit   id   done   If the contents are saved in a file named find-commits sh then a typical invocation will be as under   cat blobs txt   find-commits sh   As earlier  the file blobs txt lists blob hashes  one per line  The create db   function saves a cache of all commit listings in a sub-directory in the current directory   Some stats from my experiments on a system with two Intel R  Xeon R  CPU E5-2620 2 00GHz processors presented by the OS as 24 virtual cores    Total number of commits in the repo   almost 11 000 File creation speed    126 files s  The script creates a single file per commit  This occurs only when the cache is being created for the first time  Cache creation overhead   87 s  Average search speed   522 commits s  The cache optimization resulted in 80  reduction in running time    Note that the script is single threaded  Therefore  only one core would be used at any one time

User · Answer

How can I track down the large files in the git history    Start by analyzing  validating and selecting the root cause  Use git-repo-analysis to help   You may also find some value in the detailed reports generated by BFG Repo-Cleaner  which can be run very quickly by cloning to a Digital Ocean droplet using their 10MiB s network throughput

[git] How to find/identify large commits in git history?

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