Git - Remove All of a Certain Type of File from the Repository

You simply have to run this in order to remove all your jars from the index:

git rm -r --cached **/*.jar

Run this command from your root directory of the project and it will clean up and will remove all your file only from the staging area.

With Git 2.24 (Q4 2019), git filter-branch is deprecated.

The equivalent would be, using newren/git-filter-repo, and its example section:

cd repo
git filter-repo --path-glob '*.jar' --invert-paths

That will remove any jar file from the repository history.

The easiest way I've found is to use the BFG Repo-Cleaner

The instructions on the project page are clear. The command you would use is something like:

bfg --delete-files "*.jar"  my-repo.git

BFG will clean the history of the repo of all files ending in the .jar extension. You can then inspect the result before pushing it back to the server.

git filter-branch --index-filter 'git rm -rf --cached **/*.jar'

should work, but it's a bit silly because git globs (*) match path separators. So, **/*.jar is equivalent to *.jar.

This also means that */a*.jar matches dir1/abc/dir2/log4j.jar. If you want to match something like **/a*.jar (all jars whose name starts with a in any directory), you should use find. Here's a command to remove any jars whose names start with a or b, and any jars in dir1/dir2, and any .txt file in any directory:

git filter-branch --index-filter 'git rm -rf --cached "*.txt" "dir1/dir2/*.jar" $(find -type f -name "a*.jar" -o -name "b*.jar")'

References: pathspec section of git help glossary.