Clean up large files on git server

Question

Someone accidentally committed some large (multi-GB) binaries to my self-hosted gitlab repository, and now every time someone tries to pull from the repository the server ge

Answer 1

To do this, you will break the history of the repositories of any one that had pushed from this commit. You will have to tell them.

What you need is to rebase your remote repository and remove this commit.

First, rebase in your repository.

git rebase -i problematicCommit~1

This will open your default editor. Remove the line of the commit problematicCommit. Save the file and close it.

Remove the branch in your remote repository.

git push origin :nameOfTheBranch

Look the dots before the name of the branch.

Finally, create again the branch in the remote.

git push origin nameOfTheBranch

This regenerate the branch in the remote without the conflictive commit and the new clones will be fast again.

Now, If you still notice that your repository is going slow. You can erase the untracked objects (e.g. the ones with this big file) that it has.

First, remove all tags, branches that could be pointing to the old commits. This is important because to be able to erase old commits, they must be untracked.

Then, following the VonC comment stackoverflow.com/a/28720432/6309 - Do in your repository and in the remote:

git gc
git repack -Ad
git prune