Development

How to permanently remove a file from Git history

We all make mistakes sometimes. Pushing files that contain some secrets or sensitive information to a Git repository is fairly common. And even if we revert the commit, it would still be present in the Git history of the project. In such cases, where we want to permanently remove a file from Git history, we need to perform a couple of steps.

1. If the file involved some secrets, revoke them immediately

2. Add the file to gitignore.

Assuming it was a .env file,

echo '.env' >> .gitignore

Bash

3. Permanently remove a file from Git history:

git filter-branch --index-filter "git rm -rf --cached --ignore-unmatch .env" HEAD

Bash

If it is a different file, replace “.env” with the path of the file.

Note: This can be a time-consuming process as it revisits all of the git commits in history and removes the file from there.

4. Force push

git push --force

Bash

Since we rewrote a bunch of commits, we will have to do a force push to modify the git history of the project. If there are multiple branches on the project, or a team working on the project, this might be cumbersome and we would want to search for the commits manually and rebase them instead.

Note: If we only wanted to remove the file and did not care about deleting it from the git history, we would have used the command:

git rm -r --cached .env

Bash

And that is it. Drop-in a comment below if you have any questions.

Saransh Kataria

Born in Delhi, India, Saransh Kataria is the brain behind Wisdom Geek. Currently, Saransh is a software developer at a reputed firm in Austin, and he likes playing with new technologies to explore different possibilities. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science. He also shares his passion for sharing knowledge as the community lead at Facebook Developer Circle Delhi, NCR which is a developer community in Delhi, India.

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View Comments

Moshe Schnitzler says:

December 26, 2022 at 5:48 pm

Thanks for this information. One question though, it is still possible to access the URL to the GitHub history where my .env file history 'was' located. I get a warning message from GitHub that "This commit does not belong to any branch on this repository, and may belong to a fork outside of the repository". My repository has always been private and has zero forks, clones, start, etc.

Is there a way to completely delete this page?
- Saransh Kataria says:
  
  October 9, 2023 at 4:17 pm
  
  Sorry I missed this comment. Are you getting the message after following these steps? Did you do a force push? That should remove the file from git history completely