Git: Mastering Version Control

Rewriting history – changing a single file

In this example, we'll see how we can use Git filter-branch to remove sensitive data from a file throughout the repository history.

Getting ready

For simplicity, we'll use a very simple example repository. It contains a few files. One among them is .credentials, which contains a username and password. Start by cloning the repository and changing the directory, as shown in the following command:

$ git clone https://github.com/dvaske/remove-credentials.git
$ cd remove-credentials

How to do it...

1. As we need to modify a file when rewriting the history of this repository, we'll use the tree-filter option to filter branch. The .credentials file looks as follows:

   username = foobar
   password = verysecret
   

2. All we need ...