git_forget_paths.sh

Shell script to remove specified paths from a Git repository with the related history.

Quick Start

1. Prepare a params.sh copying from the sample-params.sh
2. Run git_forget_paths.sh params.sh to create the repository for the first time. This may take too long.
3. Run git_forget_paths.sh params.sh again to update the existing repository from the remote repository whenever you want, and merge the created/updated branch manually.

Usage

Prepare parameters

Copy sample-params.sh as params.sh and change per your needs:

• source_url_or_path: Location of the source Git repository. This can be a URL of a remote Git repository or a path of a local Git repository path.
• source_branch: Interested remote branch. No other branch will be fetched from the remote. Equivalent local branch will be created or updated unless it is master. In the case of master, always a new branch with a name including current date-time will be created such as master-2018-06-25T07-23-35.
• target_path: Path of a non-existant directory to clone the repository into it. Note that also ${target_path}.tmp will be created and used for temporary files, and ${target_path}.bak will be created and used to backup current state of the repository before update.
• top_level_paths_to_keep: An array of top-level files and/or directories to keep. You can specify only top-level file/dir names here, not paths! CAUTION! All of the other versioned top-level directories and files will be removed.
• relative_paths_to_delete: An array of relative paths to delete among the remaining files (namely $top_level_paths_to_keep). You can specify deeper relative paths like x/y/z here.
• tags_to_delete: An array of patterns that match agains the git tags to be deleted.

Run the script

After preparing your params.sh file, you can run the script like this:

git_forget_paths.sh params.sh

This operation may take very long time depending on your repository size.

At this point, you are done until new changes made to the original repository.

Run the script again to update later

After sometime, if development goes on at the original remote repository, you may want to apply new commits from the original remote repository into your trimmed local repository.

Whenever you want to update your repository, you can run the script again in the same manner:

git_forget_paths.sh params.sh

This will find automatically the commits from both repositories mapping to each other, by using commit date + committer email as key.

After update, new changes will be appended to a branch instead of the master branch. So, you need to merge the new branch onto your master manually, if you want.

Note that if source_branch is master, then a new branch will be created with the current date-time everytime you try to update, such as master-2018-06-25T07-23-35.

If source_branch is not master, then a branch with the same name will be created if doesn't exist or updated if exists.

In the case of unexpected results, you can always rollback previous state from the backup under ${target_path}.bak. Each time you run the script to update your repo, a new backup will be created by the name of current date-time.