How to remove github history for all team members

Question

I am working on a project and using github as our source control server. The project is private and I want to make it public. But some credential is saved in the history of my git repo. I want to remove the history of commits and only keep the last commits for all branches. I know that I can do this by below commands.

Checkout

git checkout --orphan latest_branch
Add all the files

git add -A
Commit the changes

git commit -am "commit message"
Delete the branch

git branch -D master
Rename the current branch to master

git branch -m master
Finally, force update your repository

git push -f origin master

but I am worried about other team members. If I follow above steps to clear the history but other team members don't, will they have trouble when they run git pull? Or will they bring the history back when they run git push?

they should do what described [here](https://stackoverflow.com/q/4084868/2303202) — max630, Jul 08 '17 at 02:47

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 08 '17 at 00:30

0

Clone repository in state you want your project to go public
Create new repository
Push to that fresh repository

Repo will be fresh with no history as a good working base.

answered Jul 08 '17 at 00:30

Antoniossss

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I am sure it works. But I don't want to rename our repo and I want to keep the current repo name. The reason is that we have a large team and I don't want to impact all other developers. – Joey Yi Zhao Jul 08 '17 at 00:32
Git is about keeping history, so unless you push only part of it to different repo, you are out of luck i think, but i may be wrong – Antoniossss Jul 08 '17 at 00:37
@ZhaoYi you can keep the two repo in different path in server – Shihe Zhang Jul 08 '17 at 01:47
@ShiheZhang If I keep two repos in a different path, then another developer is still using the old path. He will bring all history back to the repo. – Joey Yi Zhao Jul 08 '17 at 08:56
so you don't want the old repo?then just merge it into new one. – Shihe Zhang Jul 08 '17 at 09:38
new repo on old path - no other way – Antoniossss Jul 08 '17 at 09:38

How to remove github history for all team members

1 Answers1