Remove a file from a Git repository without deleting it from the local filesystem

Question

My initial commit contained some log files. I\'ve added *log to my .gitignore, and now I want to remove the log files from my repository.

Answer 1

Above answers didn't work for me. I used filter-branch to remove all committed files.

Remove a file from a git repository with:

git filter-branch --tree-filter 'rm  file'

Remove a folder from a git repository with:

git filter-branch --tree-filter 'rm -rf directory'

This removes the directory or file from all the commits.

You can specify a commit by using:

git filter-branch --tree-filter 'rm -rf directory' HEAD

Or an range:

git filter-branch --tree-filter 'rm -rf vendor/gems' t49dse..HEAD

To push everything to remote, you can do:

git push origin master --force