The BFG Repo Cleaner

There are generally two reasons why you might need to "clean" your repo:

• The repo has grown too large

• Someone committed sensitive information

The Git functionality to handle these problems is the utility called git-filter-branch. However, unless you are a real expert with Git, git-filter-branch is pretty difficult to use. Thankfully, there is an amazing alternative called The BFG Repo-Cleaner by Roberto Tyley.

To use BFG you need to have command-line Java installed. Download and install JDK for your platform. To test your installation, open a terminal and type

$ java -version
java version "1.8.0_101"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_101-b13)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.101-b13, mixed mode)

Once Java has successfully installed, move on to installing (really just downloading) The BFG Repo-Cleaner. In the link provided, the download button is at the upper-right. Move the bfg-1.12.13.jar (or whatever the current version is) file to where ever you keep your program files (e.g., /Applications on OSX). Next, it is convenient to create an alias to the run command in your .bash_profile or .bashrc. For example, add the following line for OSX:

alias bfg="java -jar /Applications/bfg-1.12.13.jar"

Of course, if you do not want to create an alias you can just substitute "java -jar <bfg.jar>" everywhere I have "bfg" below, where <bfg.jar> is the full path to the version of BFG you downloaded.

###Usage

The BFG is more of a hatchet than a scalpel. It is not possible, for example, to go in and clean a specific commit from the history of a repo. Below we show how to: (1) remove files, (2) remove folders, (3) remove blobs (files) larger than a certain size.

IMPORTANT First, backup your repo! Mistakes cannot be undone.