[git] How do I remove the old history from a git repository?

I'm afraid I couldn't find anything quite like this particular scenario.

I have a git repository with a lot of history: 500+ branches, 500+ tags, going back to mid-2007. It contains ~19,500 commits. We'd like to remove all of the history before Jan 1, 2010, to make it smaller and easier to deal with (we would keep a complete copy of the history in an archive repository).

I know the commit that I want to have become the root of the new repository. I can't, however, figure out the correct git mojo to truncate the repo to start with that commit. I'm guessing some variant of

git filter-branch

involving grafts would be necessary; it might also be necessary to treat each of the 200+ branches we want to keep separately and then patch the repo back together (something I do know how to do).

Has anyone ever done something like this? I've got git 1.7.2.3 if that matters.

If you want to keep the upstream repository with full history, but local smaller checkouts, do a shallow clone with git clone --depth=1 [repo].

After pushing a commit, you can do

1. git fetch --depth=1 to prune the old commits. This makes the old commits and their objects unreachable.
2. git reflog expire --expire-unreachable=now --all. To expire all old commits and their objects
3. git gc --aggressive --prune=all to remove the old objects

See also How to remove local git history after a commit?.

Note that you cannot push this "shallow" repository to somewhere else: "shallow update not allowed". See Remote rejected (shallow update not allowed) after changing Git remote URL. If you want to to that, you have to stick with grafting.

When rebase or push to head/master this error may occurred

remote: GitLab: You are not allowed to access some of the refs!
To git@giturl:main/xyz.git
 ! [remote rejected] master -> master (pre-receive hook declined)
error: failed to push some refs to 'git@giturl:main/xyz.git'

To resolve this issue in git dashboard should remove master branch from "Protected branches"

then you can run this command

git push -f origin master

or

git rebase --onto temp $1 master

Maybe it's too late to post a reply, but as this page is the first Google's result, it may still be helpful.

If you want to free some space in your git repo, but do not want to rebuild all your commits (rebase or graft), and still be able to push/pull/merge from people who has the full repo, you may use the git clone shallow clone (--depth parameter).

; Clone the original repo into limitedRepo
git clone file:///path_to/originalRepo limitedRepo --depth=10

; Remove the original repo, to free up some space
rm -rf originalRepo
cd limitedRepo
git remote rm origin

You may be able to shallow your existing repo, by following these steps:

; Shallow to last 5 commits
git rev-parse HEAD~5 > .git/shallow

; Manually remove all other branches, tags and remotes that refers to old commits

; Prune unreachable objects
git fsck --unreachable ; Will show you the list of what will be deleted
git gc --prune=now     ; Will actually delete your data

How to remove all git local tags?

Ps: Older versions of git didn't support clone/push/pull from/to shallow repos.

1. remove git data, rm .git
2. git init
3. add a git remote
4. force push

Try this method How to truncate git history :

#!/bin/bash
git checkout --orphan temp $1
git commit -m "Truncated history"
git rebase --onto temp $1 master
git branch -D temp

Here $1 is SHA-1 of the commit you want to keep and the script will create new branch that contains all commits between $1 and master and all the older history is dropped. Note that this simple script assumes that you do not have existing branch called temp. Also note that this script does not clear the git data for old history. Run git gc --prune=all && git repack -a -f -F -d after you've verified that you truly want to lose all history. You may also need rebase --preserve-merges but be warned that the git implementation of that feature is not perfect. Inspect the results manually if you use that.

I needed to read several answers and some other info to understand what I was doing.

1. Ignore everything older than a certain commit

The file .git/info/grafts can define fake parents for a commit. A line with just a commit id, says that the commit doesn't have a parent. If we wanted to say that we care only about the last 2000 commits, we can type:

git rev-parse HEAD~2000 > .git/info/grafts

git rev-parse gives us the commit id of the 2000th parent of the current commit. The above command will overwrite the grafts file if present. Check if it's there first.

2. Rewrite the Git history (optional)

If you want to make this grafted fake parent a real one, then run:

git filter-branch -- --all

It will change all commit ids. Every copy of this repository needs to be updated forcefully.

3. Clean up disk space

I didn't done step 2, because I wanted my copy to stay compatible with the upstream. I just wanted to save some disk space. In order to forget all the old commits:

git prune
git gc

Alternative: shallow copies

If you have a shallow copy of another repository and just want to save some disk space, you can update .git/shallow. But be careful that nothing is pointing at a commit from before. So you could run something like this:

git fetch --prune
git rev-parse HEAD~2000 > .git/shallow
git prune
git gc

The entry in shallow works like a graft. But be careful not to use grafts and shallow at the same time. At least, don't have the same entries in there, it will fail.

If you still have some old references (tags, branches, remote heads) that point to older commits, they won't be cleaned up and you won't save more disk space.

As an alternative to rewriting history, consider using git replace as in this article from the Pro Git book. The example discussed involves replacing a parent commit to simulate the beginning of a tree, while still keeping the full history as a separate branch for safekeeping.

There are too many answers here which are not current and some don't fully explain the consequences. Here's what worked for me for trimming down the history using latest git 2.26:

First create a dummy commit. This commit will appear as the first commit in your truncated repo. You need this because this commit will hold all base files for the history you are keeping. The SHA is the ID of the previous commit of the commit you want to keep (in this example, 8365366). The string 'Initial' will show up as commit message of the first commit. If you are using Windows, type below command from Git Bash command prompt.

# 8365366 is id of parent commit after which you want to preserve history
echo 'Initial' | git commit-tree 8365366^{tree}

Above command will print SHA, for example, d10f7503bc1ec9d367da15b540887730db862023.

Now just type:

# d10f750 is commit ID from previous command
git rebase --onto d10f750 8365366

This will first put all files as-of commit 8365366 in to the dummy commit d10f750. Then it will play back all commits after 8365366 over the top of d10f750. Finally master branch pointer will be updated to last commit played back.

Now if you want to push these truncated repo, just do git push -f.

Few things to keep in mind (these applies to other methods as well as this one): Tags are not transferred. While commit IDs and timestamps are preserved, you will see GitHub show these commits in lumpsum heading like Commits on XY date.

Fortunately it is possible to keep truncated history as "archive" and later you can join back trimmed repo with archive repo. For doing this, see this guide.

This method is easy to understand and works fine. The argument to the script ($1) is a reference (tag, hash, ...) to the commit starting from which you want to keep your history.

#!/bin/bash
git checkout --orphan temp $1 # create a new branch without parent history
git commit -m "Truncated history" # create a first commit on this branch
git rebase --onto temp $1 master # now rebase the part of master branch that we want to keep onto this branch
git branch -D temp # delete the temp branch

# The following 2 commands are optional - they keep your git repo in good shape.
git prune --progress # delete all the objects w/o references
git gc --aggressive # aggressively collect garbage; may take a lot of time on large repos

NOTE that old tags will still remain present; so you might need to remove them manually

remark: I know this is almost the same aswer as @yoyodin, but there are some important extra commands and informations here. I tried to edit the answer, but since it is a substantial change to @yoyodin's answer, my edit was rejected, so here's the information!

According to the Git repo of the BFG tool, it "removes large or troublesome blobs as git-filter-branch does, but faster - and is written in Scala".

https://github.com/rtyley/bfg-repo-cleaner