How to reduce the size of a repo on Github

Question

I accidentally committed some large test wav files into my repository and they are using up a lot of space on my Github account. How can I remove these files from the history?

Note: these files were committed some time ago and are not on the HEAD commit.

Answer 1

1. Remove it from your local history on the branch where you committed it. One way to do that is using git commit --amend if it is your HEAD commit; another is git rebase --interactive.

2. Force push the updated branch to github.

   git push --force github
   

   (where github is the name of your remote for GitHub).

This will remove it from the active history. To actually reclaim the space, GitHub will need to do a garbage collection. I'm not sure a way to do that explicitly, if they don't do it automatically. You may need to file a support request.