How To Clean Up The Git Repo And Reduce Its Disk Size

Create and manage workspaces in Bitbucket Cloud A workspace contains projects and repositories. Learn how to create a workspace, control access, and more.Set up and work on repositories in Bitbucket Cloud Whether you have no files or many, you'll want to create a repository. These topics will teach you everything about repositories.Build, test, and deploy with Pipelines Pipelines is an integrated CI/CD service built into Bitbucket. In your user folder in Databricks Repos, clone your remote repository.

A best practice is to create a new feature branch, or select a previously created branch, for your work, instead of directly committing and pushing changes to the main branch. You can make changes, commit, and push changes in that branch. When you are ready to merge your code, create a pull request and follow the review and merge processes in Git. Now it was originally build to kill history so it can actually delete files, like obliterate files, from your history or entire folders or even strings within files. The git tag action allows a user to apply a tag to the git repository in the workspace based on the git commit used in the build applying the tag. The git plugin does not push the applied tag to any other location.

If the workspace is removed, the tag that was applied is lost. Tagging a workspace made sense when using centralized repositories that automatically applied the tag to the centralized repository. Applying a git tag in an agent workspace doesn't have many practical uses. So that's how you can use the BFG to rewrite your history.

But this kind of question that you get to, particularly with big repositories or repositories that have very long histories and that is which files should I be tracking with LFS. And what Repofactor does is it helps you identify large blob chains sitting inside your repository. Then it calculates the average size of that blob over time. And this is really good cause that size is sort of a function of how well that file compresses. So, first of all to understand why Git has such a hard time with large binaries you need to know a little bit about the Git data model. Now when you think about the changes to a code base over time, as it relates to version control, you're probably thinking about a set of revisions or commits.

Now in Git, these revisions, actually they're called commits in Git, these commits don't just float in space. Specifically each commit has a reference to its immediate parent or parents in the case of a merge commit. Now if we put in branches or tags, more commonly known as refs in Git parlance, you start to get a picture of what the Git data model looks like. Now this data structure is known as a DAG, or a Directed Acyclic Graph. Basically each node represents a commit, or as we'll see in a second, another object sitting inside your Git data store. And it's directed because each object references another object that was created at some point in time before it.

The A in DAG stands for acyclic because each of these objects is immutable. When you create a new object, it refers to an object that already exists. So you can never create a cycle inside this data structure.

With my Vulkan C++ example github repository approaching 200 MB in size I decided it was about time to shrink it down to a reasonable size again. So you can add and stage and commit files and it will actually do all the Git LFS invocations under the hood for you. And also does like a binary previews like the image diffing that we saw before in Bitbucket and reads through automatically to your backend Git LFS store. Rebase before push Some Jenkins jobs may be blocked from pushing changes to the remote repository because the remote repository has received new commits since the start of the job.

This may happen with projects that receive many commits or with projects that have long running jobs. The Rebase before push option fetches the most recent commits from the remote repository, applies local changes over the most recent commits, then pushes the result. The plugin uses git rebase to apply the local changes over the most recent remote changes. Clean the workspace before every checkout by deleting all untracked files and directories, including those which are specified in .gitignore.

Ensures that the workspace is in the same state as if cloned and checkout were performed in a new workspace. Reduces the risk that current build will be affected by files generated by prior builds. Does not remove files in the .git repository of the workspace. Clean the workspace after every checkout by deleting all untracked files and directories, including those which are specified in .gitignore. Ensures that the workspace is in the same state as if clone and checkout were performed in a new workspace.

Shallow clone Perform a shallow clone by requesting a limited number of commits from the tip of the requested branch. Git will not download the complete history of the project. This can save time and disk space when you just want to access the latest version of a repository. There's this awesome tool called the BFG Repo-Cleaner. It's by a developer who works at The Guardian called Roberto Tyley.

Now Roberto, when he initially built this tool, had a problem. A developer had accidentally committed something sensitive to an earlier version of a properties file sitting in his repo. And this was a problem because to remove that he'd have to go back and basically, you know, run filter branch and eviscerate that from history. And now filter branch is awesome but it's kind of the swiss army knife of repository history rewriting. But it is also pretty intimidating to use and it can be extremely slow. Now one of the things about Git is that at the end of the day, it's a collection of bash scripts and underlying other commands written in C.

So filter branch typically actually walks your entire DAG and reprocesses the same objects and trees over and over again. So when you run git push, those large files get transferred to a separate storage and your Git DAG gets transferred to your Git repository as normal. Then, and this is where the magic happens, when a developer does a clone, or a fetch, or a pull, that DAG is transferred back down to that developer's computer.

So you don't get every single version of these large files in your history. Update new tag Modify existing tag in the workspace so that it points to the most recent commit. Many git repository hosting services will reject attempts to push a tag which has been modified to point to a different commit than its original commit.

Refer to force push for an option which may force the remote repository to accept a modified tag. The git documentation strongly advises against updating tags. The Jenkins git plugin provides a "git publisher" as a post-build action. The git publisher can push commits or tags from the workspace of a Freestyle project to the remote repository.

Honor refspec on initial clone Perform initial clone using the refspec defined for the repository. This can save time, data transfer and disk space when you only need to access the references specified by the refspec. If this is not enabled, then the plugin default refspec includes all remote branches. I did the steps as @monfresh suggested and recovered a lot of space on my local machine.

But how can I integrate the changes with the remote on github.com? When I try to push new commits, it says the remote contains that I don't have locally. So I did git pull, but now my local repository is back to its original size before cleaning up. Deleting files in a commit doesn't actually reduce the size of the repository, because the earlier commits and blobs still exist.

We recommend the open-source community-maintained toolgit filter-repo. Deleting files in a commit doesn't actually reduce the size of the repository, because the earlier commits and blobs still exist. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Pro. So as you have large binaries, the repository bloats and bloats and bloats.

But with Git, it's a distributed version control system. So you're actually copying around the entire history of your repository every time you need to do a push or a pull or a clone. So that means that I'm pushing every single version of this file that I've touched up to the server and the rest of my team has to pull down every single version of that file. And now the next thing that this commit object has is a tree.

And the tree is analogous to the root level directory that's being tracked by this Git repository. So we'll see in a second but that tree actually contains references to every single object, or file, that's being tracked in our Git repo. But for most commits, this is basically all you're going to see. Additionally, the first time you access a repo after Files in Repos is enabled, you must open the Git dialog. A dialog appears indicating that you must perform a pull operation to sync non-notebook files in the repo.

If there are any merge conflicts, another dialog appears giving you the option of discarding your conflicting changes or pushing your changes to a new branch. The important thing to notice is that we have a copy of every blob atHEADbut the blobs in the history are not present. If your repository has a deep history full of large blobs, then this option can significantly reduce yourgit clonetimes.

The commit and tree data is still present, so any subsequentgit checkoutonly needs to download the missing blobs. The Git client knows how to batch these requests to ask the server only for the missing blobs. Git LFS makes use of a method calledlazy pull and fetchfor downloading the files and their different versions.

By default, these files and their history are not downloaded every time someone clones the repository—only the version relevant to the commit being checked out is downloaded. This makes it easy to keep your repository at a manageable size and improves pull and fetch time. May also update ancillary indexes such as the commit-graph.

For the huge repositories that have lots of binary cruft committed by mistake, or old assets not needed anymore, a great solution is to usegit filter-branch. The command lets you walk through the entire history of the project filtering out, modifying, and skipping files according to predefined patterns. This feature requires git to be installed on the host where you run the docker build command.