Why can I still see the file after deleting it using BFG

Question

This are the steps I did:

1. Created an empty folder.

2. Mirrored my repository using:

   git clone --mirror [email protected]:somespace/myrepo.git
   

3. Got a list of 10 largest file using the following command:

   git rev-list --objects --all \
   | git cat-file --batch-check='%(objecttype) %(objectname) %(objectsize) %(rest)' \
   | sed -n 's/^blob //p' \
   | sort --numeric-sort --key=2 \
   | tail -n 10 \
   | cut -c 1-12,41- \
   | $(command -v gnumfmt || echo numfmt) --field=2 --to=iec-i --suffix=B --padding=7 --round=nearest
   

4. Say the name of the largest file came as largestFile.log

5. Then I ran bfg as below:

    java -jar bfg-1.14.0.jar --delete-files 'largestFile.log'
   

6. Output of above command shows the file to be successfully deleted:

   Deleted files
   -------------
   
    Filename                       Git id
    ------------------------------------------------
    largestFile 2015-05-18.log | bbaaa106 (1.3 GB)
   

7. Finally as advised by the output of step 6 above, I next ran this:

   git reflog expire --expire=now --all && git gc --prune=now --aggressive
   

8. That also completed successfully.

Now at this point, before pushing, I want to ensure that the file was indeed deleted. So I re-run the command from step 3 above. But the output of that still shows largestFile.log in the list.

What am I doing wrong? Or what am I missing here?

Can someone please explain or guide me.

Thanks!

Answer 1

The fine manual says that without the --no-blob-protection option, the HEAD commit is left unchanged. Is that your issue?

By default the BFG doesn't modify the contents of your latest commit on your master (or 'HEAD') branch, even though it will clean all the commits before it.

That's because your latest commit is likely to be the one that you deploy to production, and a simple deletion of a private credential or a big file is quite likely to result in broken code that no longer has the hard-coded data it expects - you need to fix that, the BFG can't do it for you. Once you've committed your changes- and your latest commit is clean with none of the undesired data in it - you can run the BFG to perform it's simple deletion operations over all your historical commits

...

If you want to turn off the protection (in general, not recommended) >you can use the --no-blob-protection flag:

https://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/