How to cleanup garbage in remote git repo

Question

I recently ran into a size limit with my Bitbucket repo. I followed the countless other questions answering how to clean up your git repo and ended up using BFG to remove some bad commits.

This worked great, however, I noticed that after running a git count, there was a large amount of space sitting in garbage. So I ran a simple git gc. However, that did nothing to clean up the garbage.

After some digging I found the following command:

git -c gc.reflogExpire=0 -c gc.reflogExpireUnreachable=0 -c gc.rerereresolved=0 \ -c gc.rerereunresolved=0 -c gc.pruneExpire=now gc "$@" 

Running this led to the garbage being cleaned up locally. However, I still have the issue of the remote repo. Do I now need to get Bitbucket to run this command on my remote repo, or is there a way to push this change to the repository?

Answer 1

We think we had the same problem today and were able to solve it without contacting Bitbucket support, as below. Note that the method discards last commit from the repo - so you probably want to have its backup.

Bitbucket reported that our repo was about 2.1GB, while when cloned, it only took about 250MB locally. From this, we concluded that it's most likely from big files in unreachable commits (thanks to this answer).

This is how to see unreachable commits locally, where we don't take into account reachability via reflog:

git fsck --unreachable --no-reflog

Locally, unreachable commits can be cleaned with:

git reflog expire --expire-unreachable="now" --all git prune --expire="now" -v git gc --aggressive --prune="now" 

We cannot however run any of these commands remotely on Bitbucket. But, they say on the page about reducing repo size (section Remove the repository limitation) that they run git gc themselves in response to doing git reset --hard HEAD~1 (which discards last commit) followed by git push -f. Also, they say in the section Garbage collecting dead data that one can try the sequence: git reflog expire --expire=now --all, git gc --prune=now, git push --all --force. Given all this, I decided to try the following locally, hoping it'd cut out the reflog and do a prune locally, and then push them to remote Bitbucket repository, on which it'd start a gc:

git reflog expire --expire-unreachable="30m" --all git prune --expire="30m" -v git gc --prune="30m" git reset --hard HEAD~1 git push -f 

This worked, repo size immediately went from 2.1GB to ca. 250MB. :)

Note that the time param to expire / expire-unreachable / prune sets the expiration cut-off point measuring from now back. So e.g. "now" means expire / prune everything, and "30m" means except for changes in last 30 minutes.