Need to remove folder and contents from the repo but not on the server

[Christopher Mendla]

I pushed from the production server to a repo that I just created. The server had a .gitignore but I think that didn't take effect because it wasn't in bitbucket yet. (I might be wrong on that?)

Here is what I did

• Create the repo in bitbucket with nothing but a readme
• Set the upstream on the server to the bitbucket repo
• pulled the bitbucket changes (readme) to the server
• Committed and pushed

The gitignore that was on the server ended up in the repo as expected. It contained entries such as

• .gitignore
• /log
• /tmp
• /public/system
• /public/*.pdf

However the repo now has /log, /tmp etc.  It is extremely slow.

How do I fix this?   I've been looking at git rm -r --cached but I don't think that will work with the folders.

I've also seen git filter-branch.   I'm a bit unsure of the exact syntax I need.

To summarize:  My goal is to remove the folder/files that were listed in the original .gitignore from the repo. There were previous commits that show from the server. However, if I click on the commit link I get "something went wrong". I'm not particularyly worried about that right now.

What I want to do is get rid of the folders and files that shouldn't be in the repo.

thanks,

chris

[Ana Retamal]

Hi Christopher! The purpose of gitignore files is to ensure that certain files not tracked by Git remain untracked and looks like in your case they were already tracked. To stop tracking a file that is currently tracked, you need to use git rm --cached. For more details you can read Git ignore and Git rm.

This blog contains examples that might help you. As always, it's important to have a backup of your data before performing this kind of operations if you're not familiar with them. 

Hope that helps!

Ana

[Christopher Mendla]

I'm going to try that. I was wondering though, if that would reduce the repo size from the 1 GB that it is currently to the 100k or so it should be.

From what I understand, there is a possibility that the folders I would be removing from the repo would still exist in previous commits.