Remove large commits from git

Question

We\'re running a central git repository (gforge) that everyone pulls from and pushes to. Unfortunately, some inept co-workers have decided that pushing several 10-100Mb jar file

Answer 1

In addition to the other answers, you may want to consider adding some pre-emptive protection against future giant jar files, in the form of a pre-receive hook in the repo that forbids users (or at least "non-admin users") from pushing very large files, or files named *.jar, or whatever seems best.

We've done this sort of thing before, including forbidding specific commit IDs because of certain users who just couldn't get the hang of "save your work on a temp branch, reset and pull, and re-apply your work, minus the giant file".

Note that the pre-receive hook runs in a rather interesting context: the files have actually been uploaded, it's just that the references (usually branch heads) have not actually changed yet. You can prevent the branch heads from changing but you'll still be using (temporary, until gc'ed) disk space and network bandwidth.