Remove files from remote branch in git

Question

I accidentally pushed some files to my remote Git branch. What is the best way to remove those particular files from the remote branch?

Answer 1

Since you do not want to push those files to the remote server, but want to keep the copies locally, your best bet is to do git rm with a --cached flag.

Basically, do this:

git rm --cached some/filename.ext
git rm --cached -r some/directory/

and then commit and push your changes back using

git commit -m "removing redundant files"

From the manpage for git rm:

--cached

Use this option to unstage and remove paths only from the index. Working tree files, whether modified or not, will be left alone.

Answer 2

Pull the changes from remote, do a git rm on your local repository, commit the changes, and again push to the remote. The files will be deleted.

You can check this earlier question on Stack Overflow: How can I delete files in the remote repository?