Git Clients

git-filter-repo – quickly rewrite git repository history

git filter-repo is a versatile tool for rewriting history.

git-filter-repo destructively rewrites history (unless --analyze or --dry-run are given) according to specified rules.

It refuses to do any rewriting unless either run from a clean fresh clone, or --force was given.

While most users will probably just use filter-repo as a simple command line tool (and likely only use a few of its flags), at its core filter-repo contains a library for creating history rewriting tools.

This is free and open source software.

Features include:

  • Several different types of history rewrites are possible; examples include (but are not limited to):
    • Stripping large files (or large directories or large extensions).
    • Stripping unwanted files by path.
    • Extracting wanted paths and their history (stripping everything else).
    • Restructuring the file layout (such as moving all files into a subdirectory in preparation for merging with another repo, making a subdirectory become the new toplevel directory, or merging two directories with independent filenames into one directory).
    • Renaming tags (also often in preparation for merging with another repo).
    • Replacing or removing sensitive text such as passwords.
    • Making mailmap rewriting of user names or emails permanent.
    • Making grafts or replacement refs permanent.
    • Rewriting commit messages.
  • Additionally, several concerns are handled automatically (many of these can be overridden, but they are all on by default):
    • Rewriting (possibly abbreviated) hashes in commit messages to refer to the new post-rewrite commit hashes.
    • Pruning commits which become empty due to the above filters (also handles edge cases like pruning of merge commits which become degenerate and empty).
    • Creating replace-refs for old commit hashes, which if manually pushed and fetched will allow users to continue to refer to new commits using (unabbreviated) old commit IDs.
    • Stripping of original history to avoid mixing old and new history.
    • Repacking the repository post-rewrite to shrink the repo for the user.
  • Safety mechanism:
    • Abort if run from a repo that is not a fresh clone (to prevent accidental data loss from rewriting local history that doesn’t exist anywhere else).
  • Option to analyze a repository and generate reports that can be useful in determining what to filter (or in determining whether a separate filtering command was successful).

Website: github.com/newren/git-filter-repo
Support:
Developer: Elijah Newren
License: MIT License

git-filter-repo options

git-filter-repo is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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