Remove folder and its contents from Git/GitHub's history

WARNING: git filter-branch is no longer officially recommended. The official recommendation is to use git-filter-repo; see André Anjos' answer for details.

If you are here to copy-paste code:

This is an example which removes node_modules from history

git filter-branch --tree-filter "rm -rf node_modules" --prune-empty HEAD
git for-each-ref --format="%(refname)" refs/original/ | xargs -n 1 git update-ref -d
echo node_modules/ >> .gitignore
git add .gitignore
git commit -m 'Removing node_modules from git history'
git gc
git push origin main --force

What Git actually does:

The first line iterates through all references on the same tree (--tree-filter) as HEAD (your current branch), running the command rm -rf node_modules. This command deletes the node_modules folder (-r, without -r, rm won't delete folders), without any prompt given to the user (-f). The added --prune-empty deletes useless (not changing anything) commits recursively.

The second line deletes the reference to that old branch.

The rest of the commands are relatively straightforward.

I find that the --tree-filter option used in other answers can be very slow, especially on larger repositories with lots of commits.

Here is the method I use to completely remove a directory from the Git history using the --index-filter option, which runs much quicker:

# Make a fresh clone of YOUR_REPO
git clone YOUR_REPO
cd YOUR_REPO

# Create tracking branches of all branches
for remote in `git branch -r | grep -v /HEAD`; do git checkout --track $remote ; done

# Remove DIRECTORY_NAME from all commits, then remove the refs to the old commits
# (repeat these two commands for as many directories that you want to remove)
git filter-branch --index-filter 'git rm -rf --cached --ignore-unmatch DIRECTORY_NAME/' --prune-empty --tag-name-filter cat -- --all
git for-each-ref --format="%(refname)" refs/original/ | xargs -n 1 git update-ref -d

# Ensure all old refs are fully removed
rm -Rf .git/logs .git/refs/original

# Perform a garbage collection to remove commits with no refs
git gc --prune=all --aggressive

# Force push all branches to overwrite their history
# (use with caution!)
git push origin --all --force
git push origin --tags --force

You can check the size of the repository before and after the gc with:

git count-objects -vH

It appears that the up-to-date answer to this is to not use filter-branch directly (at least Git itself does not recommend it anymore), and defer that work to an external tool. In particular, git-filter-repo is currently recommended. The author of that tool provides arguments on why using filter-branch directly can lead to issues.

Most of the multi-line scripts above to remove dir from the history could be rewritten as:

git-filter-repo --path dir --invert-paths

The tool is more powerful than just that, apparently. You can apply filters by author, email, refname and more (full man page here). Furthermore, it is fast. Installation is easy; it is distributed in a variety of formats.

In addition to Mohsen's popular answer, I would like to add a few notes for Windows systems. The command

git filter-branch --tree-filter 'rm -rf node_modules' --prune-empty HEAD

• works perfectly without any modification! Therefore, you must not use Remove-Item, del or anything else instead of rm -rf.

• If you need to specify a path to a file or directory use slashes like ./path/to/node_modules

The best and most accurate method I found was to download the bfg.jar file: https://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/

Then run the commands:

git clone --bare https://project/repository project-repository
cd project-repository
java -jar bfg.jar --delete-folders DIRECTORY_NAME
git reflog expire --expire=now --all && git gc --prune=now --aggressive
git push --mirror https://project/new-repository

If you want to delete files then use the delete-files option instead:

java -jar bfg.jar --delete-files *.pyc

Complete copy&paste recipe, just adding the commands in the comments (for the copy-paste solution), after testing them:

git filter-branch --tree-filter 'rm -rf node_modules' --prune-empty HEAD
echo node_modules/ >> .gitignore
git add .gitignore
git commit -m 'Removing node_modules from git history'
git gc
git push origin master --force

After this, you can remove the line "node_modules/" from .gitignore

For Windows user, please note to use " instead of ' Also added -f to force the command if another backup is already there.

git filter-branch -f --tree-filter "rm -rf FOLDERNAME" --prune-empty HEAD
git for-each-ref --format="%(refname)" refs/original/ | xargs -n 1 git update-ref -d
echo FOLDERNAME/ >> .gitignore
git add .gitignore
git commit -m "Removing FOLDERNAME from git history"
git gc
git push origin master --force

I removed the bin and obj folders from old C# projects using Git on Windows. Be careful with

git filter-branch --tree-filter "rm -rf bin" --prune-empty HEAD

It destroys the integrity of the Git installation by deleting the usr/bin folder in the Git install folder.

For copypasters (from here):

git filter-repo --invert-paths --path PATH-TO-YOUR-FILE-WITH-SENSITIVE-DATA
echo "YOUR-FILE-WITH-SENSITIVE-DATA" >> .gitignore
git add .gitignore
git commit -m "Add YOUR-FILE-WITH-SENSITIVE-DATA to .gitignore"
git push origin --force --all

I wanted to use the git-filter-repo, so I did:

• cd into usr/local/bin
• touch git-filter-repo (the file does not have any extension or cannot change the name of the file.) and copy pasted the git-filter-repo code (you can use whatever command u wanna use to download that into your PATH)
• cloned my target repo because that's what git-filter-repo works on. git clone --bare [email protected]:yourgit/yourepo.git
• then, cd yourrepo
• Run this command inside of that freshly cloned repo. git-filter-repo --path dirNameYouWantToDelete --invert-paths
• git push origin master --force (if there is a better way I would like to know..)
• then I went back to my old repo and stashed all my changes and git pull.

then it deleted my unwanted directory history and was able to .gitignore the unwanted dir.

If you want to remove nested files:

git filter-branch -f --tree-filter "find . -name '*.png' -type f -delete" --prune-empty HEAD