git-obliterate: for removing sensitive files you may have committed from the entire history of the project.

readme.md

git-obliterate

Has this ever happened to you?

cue video of someone accidentally committing super-secret-private-stuff.json

Time to blow away the entire project and start over right?

Wrong!

With git-obliterate, you can make it seem like the file has never existed in the project's history!

Usage

First, read this because I'm mostly just scripting a lot of what they say here: https://help.github.com/articles/remove-sensitive-data

Download the file, chmod +x it, and copy it to /usr/local/bin (or somewhere else in your PATH). Then you can do git obliterate <file> and it will wipe it from history. Singing Cher's “If I Could Turn Back Time” is optional. You will then have to git push --force to update your remote.

After that's done, you'll need to force update your remotes with git push --force, making sure to do all the branches and tags and everything that the file might have been in – if you're lucky, you will have caught it early and hopefully that should just be master.

Lazy Install

curl -O https://gist.github.com/brianloveswords/7545299/raw/6128cb79b624d915bfc1942177a3508fd47efbfe/git-obliterate && chmod +x git-obliterate && sudo mv git-obliterate /usr/local/bin

git-obliterate

#!/bin/bash
file=$1
test -z $file && echo "file required." 1>&2 && exit 1
git filter-branch -f --index-filter "git rm -r --cached $file --ignore-unmatch" --prune-empty --tag-name-filter cat -- --all
git ignore $file
git add .gitignore
git commit -m "Add $file to .gitignore"

@Babkock I thought I saw a similar result, but after a local git pull / git push indeed my offending file was obliterated.

• edit: note that if the offending file was committed with another file at some previous point, the history of the offending file will still be available with the history of that other file.

If you're coming to this thread to obliterate, the 2021 option is to use this tool - https://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/

It's fantastic. Way faster than obliterate and useful options to delete files bigger than Xmb

The 2022 way to obliterate a file is to just type the following line. No need to download any scripts or tools at all. It's line 4 of the above git-obliterate script:
git filter-branch -f --index-filter "git rm -r --cached $file --ignore-unmatch" --prune-empty --tag-name-filter cat -- --all
Just replace $file with your filename.

After this finishes, don't forget to push your changes to the remote using:
git push --force

Since this isn't in the script I think not doing this is why some people say the script doesn't work.