git dark magic

So, your git history is messed up, or you are thinking about messing it up. To use the dark magic of git, you pay the price of breaking the repo history, but hopefully fix something else.

My choice of book of dark spells was git-filter-repo Assume you have committed a large file. To identify the problem run

git filter-repo --analyze

which will give you a nice run down of large files in your history. To erase a file from history run

  git filter-repo --invert-paths --path filename

In my case, I really wanted to unify the formatting of all my c++ files. git-filter-repo cheat sheet to the rescue! Simply running

lint-history --relevant 'return (filename.endswith(b".cpp") or filename.endswith(b".hpp"))' clang-format -style=file:.clang-format -i

with a .clang-format file in the root of the git repo worked like a charm (or maybe more like a hex..)

To change things from a few commits ago,

git rebase --interactive <commit ID>~

Please note the tilde ~ at the end of the command. In the editor change pick to edit from the commit in question. Close the file, make the changes and then commit using

git commit --all --amend --no-edit

After that, return back to the previous HEAD commit using:

git rebase --continue

This will change the SHA-1 of that commit as well as all children, so again: it break everything!