git-rocket-filter

There also git rocket filter [0] which I personally prefer, which is slightly faster than BFG, and more suitable if you already use dotnet, and if you don't use Java. It also have scripting features - you can optionally run arbitrary C# code snippet (written inline) on each blob, given its details, to decide whether to keep it or not. However, as opposed to BFG, Git rocket filter doesn't seem to be maintained. But it just works, even with the newest git repos. It saved me a couple of times in the last 4 years, when people on my team and other teams committed huge binaries to git and immediately pushed. This usually happens when just starting out with git in various teams, without having first set up a pull request pipeline. [0] https://github.com/xoofx/git-rocket-filter

https://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/ (Java) seems to be the favored tool; there's also https://github.com/xoofx/git-rocket-filter (.NET) and the built-in commands: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2100907/how-to-remove-de... You'll have to unprotect the branch to force push to GitHub, and anyone who has already cloned the repo may not appreciate basically having to start over, so better to get it over with ASAP!

git rocket-filter[0] is a friendlier CLI alternative to filter-branch or BFG, although it's a dotnet app and requires the (cross-platform) dotnet runtime. I've used it successfully to remove huge or sensitive files people pushed to the repo by mistake, it removed them across many branches and merge commits. That said, I agree with all your points. Personally I almost never use the CLI, I use a GUI front-end (Tortoise-Git, which is windows only). I do use the CLI for occasional scripting or complex operations, but that's rare. I also train junior devs on git in our company. In fact I just spent part of the last couple months preparing an internal Git course, after having written a non-trivial Git integration for my internal app, which was a painful process and took over 2 years, mostly not Git's fault though. The Git course I've prepare

I second the recommendation to use git rocket filter [1] from this link. A guy in our team committed a big file unnecessarily into the repo which already had a year's history behind it, and it was only a month later when I found out. git rocket filter filtered it in a few seconds. Since all team members had already gotten it, I ran it on all their repos to verify it's gone, and ran the usual git gc incantation [0] to clean their repo. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/29203553 [1] https://github.com/xoofx/git-rocket-filter