Reducing git pack size with removing binary files

Question

The repo is containing folder with binary files and that causes increasing the pack size in .git folder, now .git is ~800MB (80% of total size) and repo size is 1GB.

I've tried to delete the folder and commit it and do all these git gc, git fsck, git prune,... but no change in size of the pack.

there are a lot of suggestion with a simple search on google but none of them working for me!

so how can I reduce my repo size, should I delete files from history one by one which is definitely not a solution for me as there are lots of them!!

Answer 1

The solutions is to remove large binary files, but not one at time by hand.

Instead you should use the BFG tool powerful tool.

Here is an example (as described by the above link):

git clone --mirror git://example.com/some-big-repo.git

java -jar bfg.jar --strip-blobs-bigger-than 100M some-big-repo.git

cd some-big-repo.git

git reflog expire --expire=now --all && git gc --prune=now --aggressive

git push