This process should never be attempted unless you can guarantee that all team members can produce a fresh clone. It involves altering the history and requires anyone who is contributing to the repository to pull down the newly cleaned repository before they push anything to it. Deep Clone the Repository

If you don't already have a local clone of the repository in question, create one now:

git clone remote-url

Now—you may have cloned the repository, but you don't have all of the remote branches. This is imperative to ensure a proper 'deep clean'. To do this, we'll need a little Bash script:

#!/bin/bash
for branch in `git branch -a | grep remotes | grep -v HEAD | grep -v master`; do
    git branch --track ${branch##*/} $branch
done

Copy this code into a file, chmod +x filename.sh, and then execute it with ./filename.sh. You will now have all of the remote branches as well (it's a shame Git doesn't provide this functionality). Discovering the large files

This Bash script identifies the largest files in a local Git repository:

#!/bin/bash
#set -x 

# Shows you the largest objects in your repo's pack file.
# Written for osx.
#
# @see http://stubbisms.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/git-script-to-show-largest-pack-objects-and-trim-your-waist-line/
# @author Antony Stubbs

# set the internal field spereator to line break, so that we can iterate easily over the verify-pack output
IFS=$'\n';

# list all objects including their size, sort by size, take top 10
objects=`git verify-pack -v .git/objects/pack/pack-*.idx | grep -v chain | sort -k3nr | head`

echo "All sizes are in kB. The pack column is the size of the object, compressed, inside the pack file."

output="size,pack,SHA,location"
for y in $objects
do
    # extract the size in bytes
    size=$((`echo $y | cut -f 5 -d ' '`/1024))
    # extract the compressed size in bytes
    compressedSize=$((`echo $y | cut -f 6 -d ' '`/1024))
    # extract the SHA
    sha=`echo $y | cut -f 1 -d ' '`
    # find the objects location in the repository tree
    other=`git rev-list --all --objects | grep $sha`
    #lineBreak=`echo -e "\n"`
    output="${output}\n${size},${compressedSize},${other}"
done

echo -e $output | column -t -s ', '

Execute this script as before, and you'll see some output similar to the below:

All sizes are in kB. The pack column is the size of the object, compressed, inside the pack file.

Size Pack SHA Location
1111686 132987 a561d25105c79aa4921fb742745de0e791483afa 08-05-2012.sql
5002 392 e501b79448b9e970ab89b048b3218c2853fdfc88 foo.sql
266 249 73fa731bb90b04dcf79eeea8fdd637ba7df4c089 app/assets/images/fw/iphone.fw.png
265 43 939b31c563bd40b1ca70e4f4a9f7d67c27c936c0 doc/models_complete.svg
247 39 03514d9e84418573f26b205bae7e4e57057c036f unprocessed_email_replies.sql
193 49 6e601c4067aaddb26991c4bd5fbddef003800e70 public/assets/jquery-ui.min-0424e108178defa1cc794ee24fc92d24.js
178 30 c014b20b6fed9f17a0b2809ac410d74f291da26e foo.sql
158 158 15f9e56bc0865f4f303deff053e21909661a716b app/assets/images/iphone.png
103 36 3135e15c5cec75a4c85a0636b154b83221020c97 public/assets/application-c65733a4a64a1a885b1c32694574b12a.js
99 85 c1c80bc4c09e692d5e2127e39c87ecacdb1e816f app/assets/images/fw/lovethis_logo_sprint.fw.png

Yep - looks like someone has been pushing some rather unnecessary files somewhere! Including a lovely 1.1GB present in the form of a SQL dump file.

Cleaning the files

Cleaning the file will take a while, depending on how busy your repository has been. You just need one command to begin the process:

git filter-branch --tag-name-filter cat --index-filter 'git rm -r --cached --ignore-unmatch filename' --prune-empty -f -- --all

This command is adapted from other sources—the principal addition is --tag-name-filter cat which ensures tags are rewritten as well.

After this command has finished executing, your repository should now be cleaned, with all branches and tags in tact. Reclaim space

While we may have rewritten the history of the repository, those files still exist in there, stealing disk space and generally making a nuisance of themselves. Let's nuke the bastards:

rm -rf .git/refs/original/

git reflog expire --expire=now --all

git gc --prune=now

git gc --aggressive --prune=now

Now we have a fresh, clean repository. In my case, it went from 180MB to 7MB. Push the cleaned repository

Now we need to push the changes back to the remote repository, so that nobody else will suffer the pain of a 180MB download.

git push origin --force --all

The --all argument pushes all your branches as well. That's why we needed to clone them at the start of the process.

Then push the newly-rewritten tags:

git push origin --force --tags