How to remove large entries or files from git repository history and push the changes to update GitHub

gistfile1.txt

First method (the hard way)

http://naleid.com/blog/2012/01/17/finding-and-purging-big-files-from-git-history

Second method (easier)

https://help.github.com/articles/removing-files-from-a-repository-s-history/
https://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/
also see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2100907/how-to-remove-delete-a-large-file-from-commit-history-in-git-repository

- download the BFG program (wget http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/com/madgag/bfg/1.12.8/bfg-1.12.8.jar)
- pull down a new copy of the repo from GitHub (git clone)
- navigate to the repo, check its size (du -sh)
- make sure you have java runtime 1.7 or above loaded (module load java/1.7)
- from within the repo dir, run the bfg (java -jar ../bfg-1.12.8.jar --strip-blobs-bigger-than 20M  .git)
- when its done, run the git command it gives you to finish cleaning up (git reflog expire --expire=now --all && git gc --prune=now --aggressive)
- if you are on a recent git version (module load git/2.6.5), then you can also do this too afterwards (git push origin --force)
- - that last one might not actually affect the GitHub repo size, who knows... 
- according to the BFG author, you need to wait patiently now and hope that GitHub magically updates to fix the repo size (http://stackoverflow.com/a/25466952/5359531)