How to shrink the .git folder

I tried these but my repository was still very large. The problem was I had accidentally checked in some generated large files. After some searching I found a great tutorial which makes it easy to delete the large generated files. This tutorial allowed me to shrink my repository from 60 MB to < 1 MB.

Steve Lorek, How to Shrink a Git Repository

Updated: Here's a copy-paste version of the blog post.

How to Shrink a Git Repository

Our main Git repository had suddenly ballooned in size. It had grown overnight to 180MB (compressed) and was taking forever to clone.

The reason was obvious; somebody, somewhere, somewhen, somehow, had committed some massive files. But we had no idea what those files where.

After a few hours of trial, error and research, I was able to nail down a process to:

  • Discover the large files
  • Clean them from the repository
  • Modify the remote (GitHub) repository so that the files are never downloaded again

This process should never be attempted unless you can guarantee that all team members can produce a fresh clone. It involves altering the history and requires anyone who is contributing to the repository to pull down the newly cleaned repository before they push anything to it.

Deep Clone the Repository

If you don't already have a local clone of the repository in question, create one now:

git clone remote-url

Now—you may have cloned the repository, but you don't have all of the remote branches. This is imperative to ensure a proper 'deep clean'. To do this, we'll need a little Bash script:

#!/bin/bash
for branch in `git branch -a | grep remotes | grep -v HEAD | grep -v master`; do
    git branch --track ${branch##*/} $branch
done

Thanks to bigfish on StackOverflow for this script, which is copied verbatim.

Copy this code into a file, chmod +x filename.sh, and then execute it with ./filename.sh. You will now have all of the remote branches as well (it's a shame Git doesn't provide this functionality).

Discovering the large files

Credit is due to Antony Stubbs here - his Bash script identifies the largest files in a local Git repository, and is reproduced verbatim below:

#!/bin/bash
#set -x 

# Shows you the largest objects in your repo's pack file.
# Written for osx.
#
# @see http://stubbisms.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/git-script-to-show-largest-pack-objects-and-trim-your-waist-line/
# @author Antony Stubbs

# set the internal field spereator to line break, so that we can iterate easily over the verify-pack output
IFS=$'\n';

# list all objects including their size, sort by size, take top 10
objects=`git verify-pack -v .git/objects/pack/pack-*.idx | grep -v chain | sort -k3nr | head`

echo "All sizes are in kB. The pack column is the size of the object, compressed, inside the pack file."

output="size,pack,SHA,location"
for y in $objects
do
    # extract the size in bytes
    size=$((`echo $y | cut -f 5 -d ' '`/1024))
    # extract the compressed size in bytes
    compressedSize=$((`echo $y | cut -f 6 -d ' '`/1024))
    # extract the SHA
    sha=`echo $y | cut -f 1 -d ' '`
    # find the objects location in the repository tree
    other=`git rev-list --all --objects | grep $sha`
    #lineBreak=`echo -e "\n"`
    output="${output}\n${size},${compressedSize},${other}"
done

echo -e $output | column -t -s ', '

Execute this script as before, and you'll see some output similar to the below:

All sizes are in kB. The pack column is the size of the object, compressed, inside the pack file.

size     pack    SHA                                       location
1111686  132987  a561d25105c79aa4921fb742745de0e791483afa  08-05-2012.sql
5002     392     e501b79448b9e970ab89b048b3218c2853fdfc88  foo.sql
266      249     73fa731bb90b04dcf79eeea8fdd637ba7df4c089  app/assets/images/fw/iphone.fw.png
265      43      939b31c563bd40b1ca70e4f4a9f7d67c27c936c0  doc/models_complete.svg
247      39      03514d9e84418573f26b205bae7e4e57057c036f  unprocessed_email_replies.sql
193      49      6e601c4067aaddb26991c4bd5fbddef003800e70  public/assets/jquery-ui.min-0424e108178defa1cc794ee24fc92d24.js
178      30      c014b20b6fed9f17a0b2809ac410d74f291da26e  foo.sql
158      158     15f9e56bc0865f4f303deff053e21909661a716b  app/assets/images/iphone.png
103      36      3135e15c5cec75a4c85a0636b154b83221020c97  public/assets/application-c65733a4a64a1a885b1c32694574b12a.js
99       85      c1c80bc4c09e692d5e2127e39c87ecacdb1e816f  app/assets/images/fw/lovethis_logo_sprint.fw.png

Yep - looks like someone has been pushing some rather unnecessary files somewhere! Including a lovely 1.1GB present in the form of a SQL dump file.

Cleaning the files

Cleaning the file will take a while, depending on how busy your repository has been. You just need one command to begin the process:

git filter-branch --tag-name-filter cat --index-filter 'git rm -r --cached --ignore-unmatch filename' --prune-empty -f -- --all

This command is adapted from other sources—the principal addition is --tag-name-filter cat which ensures tags are rewritten as well.

After this command has finished executing, your repository should now be cleaned, with all branches and tags in tact. Reclaim space

While we may have rewritten the history of the repository, those files still exist in there, stealing disk space and generally making a nuisance of themselves. Let's nuke the bastards:

rm -rf .git/refs/original/

git reflog expire --expire=now --all

git gc --prune=now

git gc --aggressive --prune=now

Now we have a fresh, clean repository. In my case, it went from 180MB to 7MB.

Push the cleaned repository

Now we need to push the changes back to the remote repository, so that nobody else will suffer the pain of a 180MB download.

git push origin --force --all

The --all argument pushes all your branches as well. That's why we needed to clone them at the start of the process.

Then push the newly-rewritten tags:

git push origin --force --tags

Tell your teammates

Anyone else with a local clone of the repository will need to either use git rebase, or create a fresh clone, otherwise when they push again, those files are going to get pushed along with it and the repository will be reset to the state it was in before.


You should not delete all changes older than 30 days (I think it's somehow possible exploiting Git, but really not recommended).

You can call git gc --aggressive --prune, which will perform garbage collection in your repository and prune old objects. Do you have a lot of binary files (archives, images, executables) which change often? Those usually lead to huge .git folders (remember, Git stores snapshots for each revision and binary files compress badly)


Here is what the creator of git Linus has to say about how to shrink your git repo:

The equivalent of "git gc --aggressive" - but done *properly* - is to do (overnight) something like

   git repack -a -d --depth=250 --window=250

where that depth thing is just about how deep the delta chains can be (make them longer for old history - it's worth the space overhead), and the window thing is about how big an object window we want each delta candidate to scan.

And here, you might well want to add the "-f" flag (which is the "drop all old deltas", since you now are actually trying to make sure that this one actually finds good candidates.

source: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2007-12/msg00165.html

Will this get rid of binary data that is orphaned in my repo? "git repack" will not git rid of images or binary data that you have checked into your repo and then deleted it. To delete those kind of data permanently from your repo you have to re-write your history. A common example of that is when you accidentally check in your passwords in git. You can go back and delete some files but then you have to re-write your history from then to now and then force push then new repo to your origin.

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