How to completely remove a file from git!

I recently made a mistake and committed an ISO file to git that was 2GB in size. I did not immediately notice this issue and made several local commits without a push to github working properly. I did some research and figured out how to fix this problem.

Note that this might not be a good idea if you’ve successfully pushed to your remote repository and share it with othes.

1. Remove the file from each commit with git filter-branch:

git filter-branch -f --tree-filter 'rm -f $FILENAME' HEAD

2. Remove the references:

git reflog expire --expire=now --all

3. Run garbage collection:

git gc --aggressive --prune=now

That worked for me. Let me know if you have a similar experience at: linux (at) itsecureadmin (dot) com.