Truncating git history

Sometimes you just want to throw away all the early history of a git repository. This is how to do it. Posted by Thomas Sutton on January 1, 2017

It’s the beginning of a new year so I’m cleaning out some files in my drafts directory. This post was started on 18 July 2012.

Sometimes you don’t actually want to keep the entire history of a branch in a git repository. If it’s just one or two commits you want to discard then git rebase and git filter-branch can be helpful. If you just want to drop every commit before some arbitrary point then you can do the following.

I want to rewrite the master branch to discard all commits before e41d7f633c45c46bd42e97cecf93204191d9e4c9. My new history will take the tree of this commit as its “inital commit”. The process is simple:

  1. Make a new branch (I’ll call it temp below); and

  2. Use rebase to replay every subsequent commit on top of the new branch.

git checkout --orphan temp e41d7f633c45c46bd42e97cecf93204191d9e4c9
git commit -m "Truncate history"
git rebase --onto temp e41d7f633c45c46bd42e97cecf93204191d9e4c9 master

This post was published on January 1, 2017 and last modified on January 26, 2024. It is tagged with: howto, git, old-post-is-old.