Deleting old commits

[Ryan Smith]

Being fairly new to git and SourceTree I am noticing that a repository on a project I'm working on is starting to grow in size, probably from a whole bunch of uneccessary commits. Is there a way to delete older commits from a repository in SourceTree? There doesn't seem to be a way I can find.. or is my thinking on this an error in approach?

Thanks

[Jeff Thomas]

Hey Ryan,

You could probably use Git Rebase to squash the commits you don't want onto ones that you want. SourceTree has the option to rebase interactively by right-clicking on a parent commit. I'd create a clone of the repository to experiment with first though.

What's your goal here? Are you wanting to remove older commits because there are a lot of individual commits and clean up the history? Or are you trying to reduce the size of the repository?

[Ryan Smith]

Hey Jeff, thanks for the prompt response. How would I go about cloning the repo?

I think the goal here would be a combination of the two, reduce the size and clean up the history as well.

Regards

[Jeff Thomas]

In SourceTree if you create a new respository, you can either clone again from the remote server or from the local directory on your machine into a new path. That will create a new copy of the repository for you to experiment in.

I don't know if rebase will actually reduce the size of the repository. Do you have a lot of large non-text files committed?