Cleaning up git repos

Notes on git cleaning

This can be a good idea for packages that needs to load fast. And where the history of commits doesnt matter or can be reset to init because the initial development isn’t important to preserve.

A 11 MB repo went to 10mb with these commands:

There will be nothing to commit 🤔

git gc --aggressive --prune=now

Squashing could be a solution

• But won’t work if there are merge commits

Reset history:

• Copy and paste the bellow to reset repo to 1 init commit with all current files (Make a backup first, this series of commands are non recovarable)

  git checkout --orphan newBranch
  git add -A
  git commit -m "Init"
  git branch -D master
  git branch -m master
  git push -f origin master
  git gc --aggressive --prune=all
  

• Ref: https://gist.github.com/stephenhardy/5470814
• bash script that does the same: https://gist.github.com/Zibri/76614988478a076bbe105545a16ee743

Alternative:

git init
git add .
git commit -m 'Initial commit'
git remote add origin [repo_address]
git push --mirror --force