Remove sensitive files and their commits from Git history

Question

I would like to put a Git project on GitHub but it contains certain files with sensitive data  usernames and passwords  like  config deploy rb for capistrano    I know I can add these filenames to  gitignore  but this would not remove their history within Git   I also don t want to start over again by deleting the   git directory   Is there a way to remove all traces of a particular file in your Git history

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To be clear  The accepted answer is correct  Try it first  However  it may be unnecessarily complex for some use cases  particularly if you encounter obnoxious errors such as  fatal  bad revision --prune-empty   or really don t care about the history of your repo   An alternative would be    cd to project s base branch  Remove the sensitive code   file rm -rf  git    Remove all git info from your code  Go to github and delete your repository Follow this guide to push your code to a new repository as you normally would - https   help github com articles adding-an-existing-project-to-github-using-the-command-line    This will of course remove all commit history branches  and issues from both your github repo  and your local git repo  If this is unacceptable you will have to use an alternate approach   Call this the nuclear option

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If you pushed to GitHub  force pushing is not enough  delete the repository or contact support Even if you force push one second afterwards  it is not enough as explained below  The only valid courses of action are   is what leaked a changeable credential like a password   yes  modify your passwords immediately  and consider using more OAuth and API keys   no  naked pics    do you care if all issues in the repository get nuked   no  delete the repository  yes   contact support if the leak is very critical to you  to the point that you are willing to get some repository downtime to make it less likely to leak  make it private while you wait for GitHub support to reply to you          Force pushing a second later is not enough because   GitHub keeps dangling commits for a long time  GitHub staff does have the power to delete such dangling commits if you contact them however  I experienced this first hand when I uploaded all GitHub commit emails to a repo they asked me to take it down  so I did  and they did a gc  Pull requests that contain the data have to be deleted however  that repo data remained accessible up to one year after initial takedown due to this  Dangling commits can be seen either through   the commit web UI  https   github com cirosantilli test-dangling commit 53df36c09f092bbb59f2faa34eba15cd89ef8e83  Wayback machine  the API  https   api github com repos cirosantilli test-dangling commits 53df36c09f092bbb59f2faa34eba15cd89ef8e83  Wayback machine   One convenient way to get the source at that commit then is to use the download zip method  which can accept any reference  e g   https   github com cirosantilli myrepo archive SHA zip  It is possible to fetch the missing SHAs either by   listing API events with type quot    quot PushEvent quot   E g  mine  https   api github com users cirosantilli events public  Wayback machine  more conveniently sometimes  by looking at the SHAs of pull requests that attempted to remove the content   There are scrappers like http   ghtorrent org  and https   www githubarchive org  that regularly pool GitHub data and store it elsewhere  I could not find if they scrape the actual commit diff  and that is unlikely because there would be too much data  but it is technically possible  and the NSA and friends likely have filters to archive only stuff linked to people or commits of interest    If you delete the repository instead of just force pushing however  commits do disappear even from the API immediately and give 404  e g  https   api github com repos cirosantilli test-dangling-delete commits 8c08448b5fbf0f891696819f3b2b2d653f7a3824 This works even if you recreate another repository with the same name  To test this out  I have created a repo  https   github com cirosantilli test-dangling and did  git init git remote add origin git github com cirosantilli test-dangling git  touch a git add   git commit -m 0 git push  touch b git add   git commit -m 1 git push  touch c git rm b git add   git commit --amend --no-edit git push -f  See also  How to remove a dangling commit from GitHub  git filter-repo is now officially recommended over git filter-branch This is mentioned in the manpage of git filter-branch in Git 2 5 itself  With git filter repo  you could either remove certain files with  Remove folder and its contents from git GitHub  39 s history pip install git-filter-repo git filter-repo --path path to remove1 --path path to remove2 --invert-paths  This automatically removes empty commits  Or you can replace certain strings with  How to replace a string in a whole Git history  git filter-repo --replace-text  lt  echo  my password   gt xxxxxxxx

User · Answer

For all practical purposes  the first thing you should be worried about is CHANGING YOUR PASSWORDS  It s not clear from your question whether your git repository is entirely local or whether you have a remote repository elsewhere yet  if it is remote and not secured from others you have a problem  If anyone has cloned that repository before you fix this  they ll have a copy of your passwords on their local machine  and there s no way you can force them to update to your  fixed  version with it gone from history  The only safe thing you can do is change your password to something else everywhere you ve used it     With that out of the way  here s how to fix it  GitHub answered exactly that question as an FAQ   Note for Windows users  use double quotes     instead of singles in this command   git filter-branch --index-filter    git update-index --remove PATH-TO-YOUR-FILE-WITH-SENSITIVE-DATA   lt introduction-revision-sha1 gt   HEAD git push --force --verbose --dry-run git push --force   Update 2019   This is the current code from the FAQ     git filter-branch --force --index-filter      git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch PATH-TO-YOUR-FILE-WITH-SENSITIVE-DATA      --prune-empty --tag-name-filter cat -- --all   git push --force --verbose --dry-run   git push --force   Keep in mind that once you ve pushed this code to a remote repository like GitHub and others have cloned that remote repository  you re now in a situation where you re rewriting history  When others try pull down your latest changes after this  they ll get a message indicating that the changes can t be applied because it s not a fast-forward    To fix this  they ll have to either delete their existing repository and re-clone it  or follow the instructions under  RECOVERING FROM UPSTREAM REBASE  in the git-rebase manpage   Tip  Execute git rebase --interactive    In the future  if you accidentally commit some changes with sensitive information but you notice before pushing to a remote repository  there are some easier fixes  If you last commit is the one to add the sensitive information  you can simply remove the sensitive information  then run   git commit -a --amend   That will amend the previous commit with any new changes you ve made  including entire file removals done with a git rm  If the changes are further back in history but still not pushed to a remote repository  you can do an interactive rebase   git rebase -i origin master   That opens an editor with the commits you ve made since your last common ancestor with the remote repository  Change  pick  to  edit  on any lines representing a commit with sensitive information  and save and quit  Git will walk through the changes  and leave you at a spot where you can    EDITOR file-to-fix git commit -a --amend git rebase --continue   For each change with sensitive information  Eventually  you ll end up back on your branch  and you can safely push the new changes

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I ve had to do this a few times to-date  Note that this only works on 1 file at a time    Get a list of all commits that modified a file  The one at the bottom will the the first commit   git log --pretty oneline --branches -- pathToFile To remove the file from history use the first commit sha1 and the path to file from the previous command  and fill them into this command   git filter-branch --index-filter  git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch  lt path-to-file gt   --  lt sha1-where-the-file-was-first-added gt

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Here is my solution in windows     git filter-branch --tree-filter  rm -f  filedir filename   HEAD      git push --force   make sure that the path is correct otherwise it won t work  I hope it helps

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In my android project I had admob keys xml as separated xml file in app src main res values  folder  To remove this sensitive file I used below script and worked perfectly   git filter-branch --force --index-filter    git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch  app src main res values admob keys xml    --prune-empty --tag-name-filter cat -- --all

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Use filter-branch   git filter-branch --force --index-filter  git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch  file path relative to git repo   --prune-empty --tag-name-filter cat -- --all  git push origin  branch name  -f

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I recommend this script by David Underhill  worked like a charm for me     It adds these commands in addition natacado s filter-branch to clean up the mess it leaves behind   rm -rf  git refs original  git reflog expire --all git gc --aggressive --prune   Full script  all credit to David Underhill      bin bash set -o errexit    Author  David Underhill   Script to permanently delete files folders from your git repository   To use    it  cd to your repository s root and then run the script with a list of paths   you want to delete  e g   git-delete-history path1 path2  if      -eq 0    then     exit 0 fi    make sure we re at the root of git repo if     -d  git    then     echo  Error  must run this script from the root of a git repository      exit 1 fi    remove all paths passed as arguments from the history of the repo files    git filter-branch --index-filter    git rm -rf --cached --ignore-unmatch  files  HEAD    remove the temporary history git-filter-branch   otherwise leaves behind for a long time rm -rf  git refs original   amp  amp    git reflog expire --all  amp  amp    git gc --aggressive --prune   The last two commands may work better if changed to the following   git reflog expire --expire now --all  amp  amp    git gc --aggressive --prune now

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Changing your passwords is a good idea  but for the process of removing password s from your repo s history  I recommend the BFG Repo-Cleaner  a faster  simpler alternative to git-filter-branch explicitly designed for removing private data from Git repos  Create a private txt file listing the passwords  etc  that you want to remove  one entry per line  and then run this command    java -jar bfg jar  --replace-text private txt  my-repo git  All files under a threshold size  1MB by default  in your repo s history will be scanned  and any matching string  that isn t in your latest commit  will be replaced with the string  quot    REMOVED    quot   You can then use git gc to clean away the dead data    git gc --prune now --aggressive  The BFG is typically 10-50x faster than running git-filter-branch and the options are simplified and tailored around these two common use-cases   Removing Crazy Big Files Removing Passwords  Credentials  amp  other Private data  Full disclosure  I m the author of the BFG Repo-Cleaner

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You can use git forget-blob   The usage is pretty simple git forget-blob file-to-forget  You can get more info here  https   ownyourbits com 2017 01 18 completely-remove-a-file-from-a-git-repository-with-git-forget-blob   It will disappear from all the commits in your history  reflog  tags and so on  I run into the same problem every now and then  and everytime I have to come back to this post and others  that s why I automated the process   Credits to contributors from Stack Overflow that allowed me to put this together

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So  It looks something like this   git rm --cached  config deploy rb echo  config deploy rb  gt  gt   gitignore      Remove cache for tracked file from git and add that file to  gitignore list

[git] Remove sensitive files and their commits from Git history

Examples related to git

Examples related to git-commit

Examples related to git-filter-branch

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