Reduce git repository size

Question

I tried looking for a good tutorial on reducing repo size  but found none  How do I reduce my repo size   it s about 10 MB  but the thing is Heroku only allows 50 MB and I m no where near finished developing my app   I added the usual suspects  log  vendor  doc etc  to  gitignore already  Although I only added  gitignore recently   Any suggestions

User · Answer

This should not affect everyone  but one of the semi-hidden reasons of the repository size being large could be Git submodules  You might have added one or more submodules  but stopped using it at some time  and some files remained in  git modules directory  To make redundant submodule files gone away  see this question  However  just like the main repository  the other way is to navigate to the submodule directory in  git modules  and do a  for example  git gc --aggressive --prune  These should have a good impact in the repository size  but as long as you use Git submodules  e g  especially with large libraries  your repository size should not change drastically

User · Answer

git gc --aggressive is one way to force the prune process to take place  to be sure  git gc --aggressive --prune now   You have other commands to clean the repo too  Don t forget though  sometimes git gc alone can increase the size of the repo  It can be also used after a filter-branch  to mark some directories to be removed from the history  with a further gain of space   see  here  But that means nobody is pulling from your public repo  filter-branch can keep backup refs in  git refs original  so that directory can be cleaned too  Finally  as mentioned in this comment and this question  cleaning the reflog can help  git reflog expire --all --expire now git gc --prune now --aggressive  An even more complete  and possibly dangerous  solution is to remove unused objects from a git repository  Update Feb  2021  eleven years later  the new git maintenance command  man page  should supersede git gc  and can be scheduled

User · Answer

Thanks for your replies  Here s what I did   git gc git gc --aggressive git prune   That seemed to have done the trick  I started with around 10 5MB and now it s little more than 980KBs

User · Answer

In my case  I pushed several big   gt  100Mb  files and then proceeded to remove them  But they were still in the history of my repo  so I had to remove them from it as well  What did the trick was  bfg -b 100M    To remove all blobs from history  whose size is superior to 100Mb git reflog expire --expire now --all git gc --prune now --aggressive  Then  you need to push force on your branch  git push origin  lt your branch name gt  --force  Note  bfg is a tool that can be installed on Linux and macOS using brew  brew install bfg

[git] Reduce git repository size

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