Reduce git repository size

Solution 1:

Update Feb. 2021, eleven years later: the new git maintenance command (man page) should supersede git gc, and can be scheduled.

Original: git gc --aggressive is one way to force the prune process to take place (to be sure: git gc --aggressive --prune=now). You have other commands to clean the repo too. Don't forget though, sometimes git gc alone can increase the size of the repo!

It can be also used after a filter-branch, to mark some directories to be removed from the history (with a further gain of space); see here. But that means nobody is pulling from your public repo. filter-branch can keep backup refs in .git/refs/original, so that directory can be cleaned too.

Finally, as mentioned in this comment and this question; cleaning the reflog can help:

git reflog expire --all --expire=now
git gc --prune=now --aggressive

An even more complete, and possibly dangerous, solution is to remove unused objects from a git repository

Solution 2:

Thanks for your replies. Here's what I did:

git gc
git gc --aggressive
git prune

That seemed to have done the trick. I started with around 10.5MB and now it's little more than 980KBs.

Solution 3:

In my case, I pushed several big (> 100Mb) files and then proceeded to remove them. But they were still in the history of my repo, so I had to remove them from it as well.

What did the trick was:

bfg -b 100M  # To remove all blobs from history, whose size is superior to 100Mb
git reflog expire --expire=now --all
git gc --prune=now --aggressive

Then, you need to push force on your branch:

git push origin <your_branch_name> --force

Note: bfg is a tool that can be installed on Linux and macOS using brew:

brew install bfg