Is there a way to entirely remove a directory and its history from GitHub?
+2
A:
Go to the edit tab; there’s a delete link at the bottom of the page.
Geoffrey Chetwood
2009-01-14 17:28:30
Not as in-depth as the expected answer. Did not mention name of label, what side of the page, etc.
Nick Stinemates
2009-10-05 22:55:53
Wish I could edit. I meant accepted answer.
Nick Stinemates
2009-10-05 23:12:43
+11
A:
If you are asking about deleting a project from GitHub, open your project, click the "Admin" tab (or browse directly to https://github.com/username/project_name/edit) and on the bottom of the page, click "Delete This Repository". It'll ask you to confirm this, and then it's gone.
If you just want to erase a part of your repository, you need to do it to your git repository and push it to GitHub. GitHub has written a howto about this in their FAQ. Haven't tried this myself, I can't guide you further, but you probably can manage this yourself here on.
In either case, this, naturally, doesn't delete any third party pulls – if someone has pulled the repository before you deleted it, it's out, without you being able to do much about it (other than trying the "pretty please"-technique)
Henrik Paul
2009-01-14 17:28:50
I don't know where I heard that first, but there is a nice saying in the Git community: "Git works just like the real world: if you want to rewrite history, you need a conspiracy". IOW, if you want to remove a directory from the history, everybody who ever cloned that repository has to be "in on it"
Jörg W Mittag
2009-01-14 18:11:01
Yeah, that, or they mistakenly pull from the central git repo. I guess that way their local histories would be erased too, although I'm not sure...
Henrik Paul
2009-01-14 19:56:01
No, they won't. Old history only gets deleted when it is no longer referenced by anything *and* you run the garbage collector. Which means that by default it won't get deleted for at least 2 weeks, because that's how long they will stay in the reflog. As long as they are in the reflog, you just ...
Jörg W Mittag
2009-01-14 21:05:45
... do `git checkout HEAD@{10.minutes.ago}` and you're back in business.In distributed version control, you have *no control* over what anybody else does with their repositories. That's the *point* of DVCS. (No *technical* control. You could have *social* controls, like work contracts.)
Jörg W Mittag
2009-01-14 21:08:25
+3
A:
To selectively delete a file or directory (and all its associated history), you can use git filter-branch.
This is very useful when you want to completely delete files checked into the repository by mistake.
The syntax is simple:
git filter-branch --tree-filter 'rm -f filename' HEAD
More info on the man page.
Baishampayan Ghose
2009-07-02 16:44:31
Doesn't really answer the question asked by the author, however it is definitely useful.
Nick Stinemates
2009-10-05 23:13:22